Welcome back, Shit Givers.

In brief: So this is how a jet stream works, apparently; The Pizza King of vaccines; Mental healthcare for sale; Fast food gets an F (again)

This Week

In an era of overwhelming complexity (hi), you have to be able to hold two truths at the same time.

For example, Twitter can be a toxic hellhole and an unrivaled way to converse in real-time with professionals you’d never otherwise have access to.

We have to fight for legislation to reduce hunger, while also feeding people right now, like tonight.

We have to equally prioritize climate adaptation and mitigation.

We have to suppress SARS-CoV-2 with vaccines and masks to prevent more suffering, deaths, and mutations, while also coming to terms with the fact that the virus isn't going anywhere, and adjusting for that new reality.

Self-awareness is just the first step, though.

Evaluating a problem and/or opportunity via first principles -- immovable, foundational elements that can’t be reduced further, or deduced any other way -- from 30,000 feet down to ground level, so we can design new systems around them via a transparent, measurable mission-based approach (“eliminate emissions from the power sector by 2035”) is the step where we struggle the most.

And that's because it's so difficult to toss away old ways of doing things. Old beliefs. Old perspectives.

But we need to, because those are the operating systems that got us here.

Climate change is here whether you're ready or not. Why? Because emissions have kept growing, from a variety of sources. A boatload of of warming is still built-in, even if we went cold turkey by EOD.

Two truths: we have to adapt for those built-in consequences now, while mitigating future destruction and suffering by reducing emissions everywhere we can.

Another one: Wildfires can be both an integral, useful part of an ecosystem, while also being far more likely to cause historic levels of damage because of choices we’ve made around aforementioned emissions and our built environment.

You can hunt for real estate in areas of the country or globe less likely to be devastated by said wildfires or toxic smoke, while acknowledging that every single place on the planet is going to see dramatic change.

And finally, we don’t really eradicate many viruses. Every other version of a coronavirus is still around. It’s important we come to terms with that little nugget. We mostly learn to live with them, to varying degrees of success.

So we have to reduce the very real damage occurring right now from Delta, while solving for an uncertain but vastly more manageable future.

Being a Shit Giver means not only executing on a bunch of awesome Action Steps, but understanding why you’re doing them, and not others -- or even more applicably, on two at the same time, building a portfolio them over time, feeling better, making change, and then we all get a day off to binge Ted Lasso.

None of this is easy. But remember what Ted said: "I promise you, there is something worse out there than being sad. And that is being alone and being sad. Ain’t no one in this room alone.”

Let's go.

Climate Change & Clean Energy

All around the world, yah yah yah

This week: The climate crisis kicked down the door of the West/Global North:

In the US:

• The Bootleg Fire in Oregon is bigger than Los Angeles, as smoke from this fire and others in Canada draped the east coast in an unexpected (and toxic) fog
• Miami’s built environment is under the microscope after a building collapse shed light on the region’s flooding and swiss cheese bedrock
• Yet another study has shown that marginalized communities in areas with high poverty are subject to temperatures up to 7°F higher than wealthy ones

In Europe:

• Up to 1500 people are missing amid historic floods in Germany and Belgium
• Great Britain’s national weather service issued its first ever extreme heat warning. I can't imagine what it feels like inside that GBBO tent right now.

In the East and Global South, it was the same old news:

In Africa:

• 400,000 people in Madagascar are facing famine, attributable to a climate crisis they basically didn’t contribute to

In Asia:

• It’s 100 degrees in Siberia, and more than 30,000 square miles have already burned in Russia
• 200,000 people were displaced across China after cities received a year’s worth of rain in a single day

In South America:

• Brazilian academics said the Amazon -- now a net-positive source of carbon emissions -- would collapse if Jair Bolsonaro remained president

The past can no longer predict the future, or even August, really, but climate change is already responsible for 5 million deaths a year.

How are we adaptaing for and mitigating the anticipated 15 billion climate migrants to come in the next thirty years?

Bueller?

How we act: You may not live in an area directly prone to fires, but flooding, storms, heat or drought or smoke are right around the corner, because this whole thing is connected.

Carbon tariffs may be a useful stick, but smoke and migration don't give a shit about your borders.

But there's good news.

For the first time since polling started in 2009, Americans rate climate change as their 2nd most important issue, just behind health care, which is interesting, because nothing threatens your health like the only habitual planet in the galaxy becoming not that.

So Europe’s on it this week, with a truly, ludicrously detailed plan to reduce emissions by at least 55%, including banning gas cars entirely by 2035.

Also:

• France voted to enact a bunch of smaller, debatable measures like banning short-distance flights in favor of trains. I'm writing this to you from a train right now! Not in France. Sigh.
• Europe's moves have put investors are on notice, finally.
• China’s “voted” to conserve 25% of its ecosystems.
• Massive decarbonization opportunities exist in construction, which is great, because we have to build. so. much. housing.
• Carbon offsets are mostly snake oil, but new tech, new ideas -- and new regulation -- abound to clean it up.
• Even California, the greenest state who inexplicably still approves new oil wells on a daily basis, might accelerate plans to go clean.

Remember: There’s decarbonization and then there’s everything else, and we're closer than we've ever been before.

⚡️ Action Step: Three options today: help identify and turn out environmental voters (read: text strangers from your soft pants); use the US Climate Resilience Toolkit to identify and argue for local climate adaptation and mitigation actions; or Run for Something yourself, and lead the next generation of elected Shit Givers.

COVID

The pizza king of vaccines

Understand this: COVID has become a disease of the unvaccinated. A pandemic for the rest of us.

Delta is vastly more infectious and, fueling unchecked among the unvaccinated. A very small percentage of breakthrough infections exist, though they require more study, and breakthroughs are a fraction of overall new cases.

For a stretch, those “rest of us” (read: the usual marginalized suspects) were deprived the same vaccine access as those able to find time and childcare to get two shots, weeks apart.

The days of access being an issue are over. Access to vaccines, that is (availability is another thing altogether).

We’ve never had access to more information -- and thus more disinformation.

COVID disinformation, rampant on Facebook, among others, is like nothing else we’ve seen before, and because of it, vaccination rates in the US have plummeted.

It’s led the US Surgeon General to quote, “We live in a world where misinformation poses an imminent and insidious threat to our nation’s health.”

It led the sitting US president to say Facebook is "killing people."

It means the unvaccinated aren’t some anti-vaxx monolith. Not knowingly, or purposefully, that is.

What would help:FDA approval of the mRNA vaccines.

While there have been exceptions, FDA approval means thousands more businesses, stores, events, and universities could require vaccines for adults and older kids to come to work or school, enter a grocery store, or attend a concert, no matter the disinformation surrounding them.

This would not be unlike every other FDA-approved and required vaccine in America.

Sure, the West has drastically reduced mortality rates. So much so that cases are growing again in England, but the vaccines are so fucking good that restrictions are now lifted entirely.

But in the rest of the world, it’s not great, Bob.

• In Saudi Arabia, 60,000 pilgrims are on their way to Mecca.
• In India, the true death toll could be well over 3 million.

Like wildfire smoke, COVID knows no boundaries. It’s still very much still with us. And every available host is an opportunity to mutate beyond Delta.

But we (you, me, all of us) have moves to make. They require compassion, and operating on a local scale.

⚡️ Action Step: Help fight disinformation among Black and Latinx groups in your area by exploring and sharing The Conversation, a video-heavy campaign led by pediatrician and public health advocate Dr. Rhea Boyd. Share the materials on Facebook -- and let me know how it goes.

Medicine & Biotech

Mental Healthcare -- Now Available Everywhere?

It’s tough out there: Let’s practice what we preach. You don’t have to be a Hans Rusling completist (I am!) to know the world’s become a vastly better place to live.

But we’ve still got work to do. And racism, inequality, fires, and COVID mean the struggle’s real than ever for a lot of folks, even in America (and maybe especially) in America), where “deaths of despair” are skyrocketing.

“Many of the problems afflicting the working class span racial groups, and Case and Deaton emphasize that > these problems aren’t merely financia> l. Life for many middle- and low-income Americans can lack structure, status and meaning. People don’t always know what days or hours they will be working the following week. They often don’t officially work for the company where they spend their days, which robs them of the pride that comes from being part of a shared enterprise.”

We’ll bounce back from isolation and COVID. Our brains are designed to do just that.

But: We needed more support before COVID, and there’s money to be made, and that means our behemoth tech industry’s taking 5 seconds away from building air taxis to LaGuardia to try and make mental wellness and healthcare more available.

• Zocdoc and Headway have teamed up to improve in-network access to a national network of therapists
• Loosened FDA rules allowed Happify Health to launch new prescription-only software designed to directly treat depression

⚡️ Action Step: Five minutes: check out this Washington Post article about practical ways to deal with climate-induced anxiety and depression.

You’re a Shit Giver, but you’re not immune. And you’re certainly not alone.

Job of the Week

Develop ground-breaking policy for electrifying America

Policy Lead, Evergreen Action:

Our friends at Evergreen -- the shop behind every piece of significant climate legislation on Joe Manchin’s desk -- seeks a full-time Policy Lead to support the development of bold, detailed policies to decarbonize our economy and transition to 100% clean energy.

Apply today!

Food & Water

"You do drugs, Danny?"

Understand this: Ah yes, the whole “two things can be true at the same time, especially in capitalism” trope.

Plant-based alternatives are all over fast food menus. Great!

On the other hand: Beef. It’s what’s (still) selling, and it’s still chock-full of fucking antibiotics.

I’m just gonna leave this here:

Chain Reaction VI

⚡️ Action Step: First, don't eat this shit if you can afford not to. Second, millions of people can't, so donate to the Food Animal Concerns Trust, the NGO behind the all-star group holding restaurant chains to task.

The Human-Machine Interface

I’m just going to copy and paste this headline word for word

”DeepMind says it will release the structure of every protein known to science”

COME ON.

From MIT Tech Review:

“Back in December 2020, DeepMind took the world of biology by surprise when it solved a 50-year grand challenge with AlphaFold, an AI tool that predicts the structure of proteins. Last week the London-based company published full details of that tool and released its source code.

Now the firm has announced that it has used its AI to predict the shapes of nearly every protein in the human body, as well as the shapes of hundreds of thousands of other proteins found in 20 of the most widely studied organisms, including yeast, fruit flies, and mice. The breakthrough could allow biologists from around the world to understand diseases better and develop new drugs.”

Better news: It’s an out and out competition.

From STAT:

“To a group of researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design, the next step was obvious: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. They followed the breadcrumbs DeepMind left at CASP, and on Thursday, simultaneously published the results of their AlphaFold dupe, called RoseTTAFold, in Science, a month after putting their work on the open access repository biorxiv.”

⚡️ Action Step: While so much of this could be used for good, it’s helpful to remember that most of the work is being completed by enormous tech companies with bills to pay.

Read up on the six big tech bills struggling their way through Congress, so you’re ready to make calls when the moment strikes.

The Round Up

COVID’s raging in LA once again as over 3 million adults remain unvaccinated

Maine will make companies pay for recycling instead. It could help!

Wait -- are the Beyond Chicken tenders incredible?

Saudi Prince vows to drill “every last molecule” of oil, so that’s fun

US life expectancy tanked in 2020, but predictably and mostly for Black and Hispanic Americans

AIDS makes COVID 30% more deadly

A study on the “Blue Carbon” wealth of nations

How General Milley prevented Trump from attacking Iran. Bless this man.

What the hell are shampoo bars?

Truly a clusterfuck of a data leak eliminates all presumptions that data privacy is a thing

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.

• Controller, C16 Biosciences
• VP, Business Development, GiveDirectly
• Policy Lead, Evergreen Action

Browse 40+ more open roles, or list your own at ImportantJobs.com.

Important Pod Guests - In The News

Dr. Kristie Ebi says heat deaths are preventable

Dr. Sian Proctor’s going to space

Alex’s Lemonade Stand is getting into crypto

Sarafina Nance on her favorite star

Boris Khentov has added the exciting new $VOTE ETF to Betterment’s Socially Responsible porfolios. Get some.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for giving a shit.

-- Quinn