Welcome back, Shit Givers.

It’s easy to get depressed by all of this. It’s also easy to feel like action, quick or otherwise, is a cure-all. It’s not. Depression is real. Anxiety is very fucking real.

But we’re here for you.

My goal is to help you feel more up to speed, more often, to truly understand this shit (the unknown is the absolute worst), and to give you some ways you can take Action, for yourself, your family, and the world around you.

It helps. I promise. But don’t disenfranchise your own grief. It’s real.

If you’re here, you’re a Shit Giver, full stop. But giving a shit means acknowledging we’re in this for the long-haul, and how hard it all can be (and on the flip side, the incredible future we can build -- if we can just drag ourselves out of this funk).

So please -- take care of yourself and your loved ones. Get professional help, if that’s your bag (it’s mine!). Find your people.

We can still build something better -- radically better.

Last week’s most popular Action Step was Call 4 Climate -- again! Keep it up!

Have an Action Step to recommend? Send it to questions@importantnotimportant.com, and we’ll put it through our vetting process!

This Week: Climate tech billions; COVID goals; A new hope for neurodegenerative diseases; An IPCC for food; Facial recognition knows no bounds

Brought to you by the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation

It’s September (oh god)! Which means it’s also Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.

And whether you’re a casual walker, avid cyclist, or running enthusiast, or you’re broken inside and out like me, you can make a difference for kids with cancer right now during The 9th Annual Million Mile.

Join Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation and participants of all ages as we log as many miles as possible and raise money to help kids with cancer through ground-breaking research and family support.

The goal? Collectively move millions of miles from September 1-30. Anyone can participate, it’s free, it’s awesome.

Invite your friends, family, and those remote co-workers you’ve never actually seen in person to join you and help fight childhood cancer, one mile at a time!

Here’s the deal: join co-executive director Jay Scott’s team with me. For every single Shit Giver that actually logs more total miles than me after September 30th, I’ll donate $500. I dare you.

Get started today at MillionMile.org!

Do Better Better

Generalism. Convergence. Inevitability. The metaverse. Whatever the hell you want to call it, we’re in it.

Hurricane Ida, after intensifying so quickly that 1) meteorologists were able to see it coming but 2) not fast enough for a proper evacuation order, crushed the Gulf Coast.

Many small towns were flooded. Devastated. New Orleans’ fancy $14 billion seawalls, gates, and levees held up.

But the power grid didn’t, owned and operated by the same folks who got us into this shit, and in the middle of a heat wave, and a pandemic, to boot.

But Ida didn’t stop there, making its way north, across the southeast, forcing the popular music festival Bonaroo to cancel for the second year in a row, the last time for the pandemic that’s still here.

From there Ida trolled the northeast, killing at least fifty people, and drowning streets and subways that are inexplicably still as vulnerable as they were with Sandy a decade ago. Today it’s doing the same with Boston’s famed dirty water.

The thing about systemic crises is eventually they intersect.

It’s the second year in a row where many on the west coast find it less safe than usual to gather inside because of said virus, and increasingly unsafe outside because of terribly toxic wildfire smoke.

Forests preserved for corporate carbon offsets are up in flames, not only defeating the purpose, but also enhancing one of the climate’s deadliest flywheels, and exacerbating the pandemic, mental illness, and more.

It’s very (very) easy to feel trapped by all this. It’s also super easy to put your head in the sand and ignore all of it (or, say, form another task force).

But as sympathetic as I am to both of those, the latter is one hell of a privileged take.

With very little respect to Joe Manchin, millions of people don’t give a shit about transitory inflation, because they’re too busy realizing they’re too poor to evacuate from of another hurricane, another fire, from smoke -- or, on the other hand, to just stay home and avoid a virus.

So let’s center our empathy with some self-awareness today, add a handful of rage on top, and get some shit done.

Climate Change & Clean Energy

Follow the money, version 348734

Understand this: If there’s one thing that’s remained undamaged by the climate crisis, it’s the money train. Even fossil fuel stocks -- not long for this world, to be sure -- aren't total garbage (despite a decade of diminishing returns).

But while folks argue whether Jerome Powell is doing enough on climate (or whether he even can), and whether he should remain the most powerful banker in the US, money is straight pouring into climate tech.

Our friends at Climate Tech VC (Hi Sophie! Hi Kimberly!) identified $16 billion in new money in Q1 and Q2, from over 1000 firms, across more than 250 deals.

The entire report is very much worth checking out here, and my man Nate Bullard at Bloomberg has a great summary here.

In other climate money news:

• UBS called on Europe to create a green capital market
• Austria’s planning their first green bonds
• Retail traders have soured on clean energy, sure, ok
• Rivian, whose EV pickup is getting rave reviews but has yet to actually be delivered to a single customer, is looking for an $80 billion valuation on the public market
• Swiss Re signed a 10 year carbon capture deal with Climeworks

What it means: We’re still in day one. But the clock’s ticking: continued air pollution is cutting billions of lives short by up to six years.

Action Step: Get a better handle on climate finance by listening to our conversation with Boris Khentov of Betterment. He designed their Climate Portfolio and understands the potential and delicate nuance required in this moment.

COVID

A mission-based approach

Understand this: It’s good to have goals.

What’s great about goals is you can reverse-engineer them, imbue them with a collaborative purpose, and work towards clear, inclusive outcomes, checking progress along the way against a specific, concrete result.

Despite President Joe Biden’s initial vaccination goals, that’s not quite where we’ve landed.

In the US, school’s back in session, and vaccines are up -- but 50 million kids can’t get them yet.

On the other hand, horse serum and hospitalization risks from Delta are also up, while data is down.

Federalism is what it is. A top-down approach only goes so far when Greg Abbott, Joe Rogan, and the Department of Health and Human Services all have the same amount of pull.

It’s easy to say we’ve lost sight of the end game (we have), but in reality, we never shared the same goal.

We may no longer have a game show president, but it’s helpful, looking at the current landscape, to understand that minority rule, misinformation -- intentional or not -- and playing to one’s audience are all employed with the same goal in mind: the consolidation and preservation of power.

For many of America’s most powerful influencers, elected or not, that’s the goal. Not 90% vaccinated, not an equitable public health system, or a reliable power grid, or environmental justice. Power.

They will break any norm or rule, lie on any network, and rally together -- Mandalorian streamers, iPad designers, and vaccine manufacturers alike -- to lobby against the last and greatest climate legislation we’ve ever had the opportunity to pass.

I’ve written before that COVID was a pop quiz where we failed on nearly every front, but in reality, I was wrong, and naive: many of our elected officials and corporate titans simply wrote their name on the test and walked out the door to go smoke in the parking lot.

They don’t give a shit what their grade is, because it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter if a huge new study says masks definitively work; if pediatric ICU beds are filling up; or if COVID long-haulers suffer.

Power is all that matters, and at all costs.

Action Step: It starts on the block. Donate, volunteer with, or run for statewide or local office with Run for Something. They’ve helped over 500 progressive young people get elected everywhere from school boards to state legislatures since 2017.

In 2020, 55% were women, 56% were BIPOC, and 21% were LGBTQIA+.

You’re next.

Medicine & Biotech

The accidental molecule

Understand this: We barely understand how a thought works, much less memory, and even less so, consciousness.

They are precious, coming together to make up who we are, to define and give meaning to our short time on this fragile planet.

But a new molecule could help salvage what’s almost inevitably lost, through time or injury.

From MIT Tech Review:

“Carmela Sidrauski wasn’t looking for a wonder drug. Testing thousands of molecules during high-speed automated experiments in the lab of Peter Walter at the University of California, San Francisco, she plucked one of the compounds out of the reject column and moved it into the group that warranted further study. Something about its potency intrigued her.

That was in 2010; today the list of potential therapeutic applications for that molecule sounds almost too good to be true. Since Sidrauski’s decision to look closer, the molecule has restored memory formation in mice months after traumatic brain injuries and shown potential in treating neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Lou Gehrig’s disease (also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS). Oh, yeah—it also seems to reduce age-related cognitive decline and has imbued healthy animals—mice, at least—with almost photographic memory.”

What it means: It’s very, very early days. But Calico licensed the molecule and has begun human safety trials, with ALS trials coming soon.

Most drugs and trials fail, but with the market for neurodegenerative conditions growing every year, every bit of research helps.

Action Step: Get (you or someone you love) involved with a trial here.

Job of the Week

Drive pediatric cancer research

Research Program Director, Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation

Look. Cancer is the worst. But kids cancer? GTFO.

The Research Program Director at Alex’s will oversee the Foundation’s prestigious research work at over 100 institutions, helping to develop new cures and save a bunch of little lives. God, I wish I were smart enough to do this job.

If you’ve got an advanced degree in biomedical and/or translational research and get the grant cycle world -- please apply for this very awesome job.

Food & Water

An IPCC report for food?

Understand this: There are 500 million smallholder farmers scattered across the globe. But industrial farming and the modern-day scientific knowledge gleaned from monocrops has got us here: an overabundance of unhealthy crops that have ruined soils and diets worldwide.

What it means: If we’re going to better understand the complexities of food and hunger, we’re going to need a vastly more inclusive knowledge-policy interface.

“We have a tendency to say that scientific knowledge is the only valid knowledge out there,” said Fabrice DeClerck, a researcher at the Alliance of Bioversity International (and) the science director at the EAT Forum. “But there is also much indigenous knowledge and local knowledge that can be drawn upon to create robust food system assessments that are more inclusive.”

Action Step: A myriad of disasters this week has required herculean efforts to efforts to feed the masses. Nobody does a better job of that than World Central Kitchen.

Feed hungry people in Haiti, Louisiana, India, Gaza -- and Afghan refugees right here in the US.

The Human-Machine Interface

It’s a Face/Off!

Understand this: You don’t own your face. Not anymore.

“Deborah Raji, a fellow at nonprofit Mozilla, and Genevieve Fried, who advises members of the US Congress on algorithmic accountability, examined over 130 facial-recognition data sets compiled over 43 years. They found that researchers, driven by the exploding data requirements of deep learning, gradually abandoned asking for people’s consent. This has led more and more of people’s personal photos to be incorporated into systems of surveillance without their knowledge.”

Just this week, Facebook was fined $5.5 million in South Korean for using facial recognition without consent over 200,000 times.

Meanwhile: 10 American federal agencies plan on expanding the use of facial recognition tech in the next two years.

Action Step: Here are some steps to actually help block Facebook from tracking you outside of their apps.

From My Notebook

Just 2% of LA’s 84 golf course acreage could provide housing for 50,000 people

Chocolate and coffee may very well survive the climate crisis after all

Carbon Mapper built a real-time emissions tracker

Shell will install 50k on-street EV chargers in the next four years

Liquid biopsies sound cool, but it also inevitably means more diagnoses. Here’s why that’s good -- and misleading.

Here comes AI dentistry!

And the newest methane leaks are from Iraq annnnd the US

How to make money off carbon farming

These are Pfizer’s variant hunters

Once upon a time, The New York Times stopped running ads for cigarettes. But for some inexplicable reason they not only still run ads for fossil fuel companies, they MAKE the ads for them. Not a typo.

If you think that’s bullshit, take 10 seconds to tell them so with the @AdsNotFit2Print campaign

Pfizer’s betting big on checkpoint inhibitors for cancer

Biden’s created the first Office of Climate Change and Health Equity...

...the same week they (were court ordered to) reopen 80 million acres to drilling

Here come electric tractors!

Measuring the costs of climate change means going deeper (literally) than simple water damage: mold is exponential.

Find more ways to contribute to mutual aid disaster relief here

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 for free here.

• Cofounder, Counterfactual Ventures (Remote)
• Product Designer, LeanTaaS (Remote)
• Software Engineer, Hardware Systems, Kairos Aerospace (Mountain View)
• Senior Software Engineer, Eleanor Health (Remote)
• Scientist, Cell-Free Applications, LanzaTech (Illinois)
• Controller, C16 Biosciences (New York)

Browse 60+ open roles, or list your own for free at ImportantJobs.com.

Important Pod Guests - In The News

Dr. Mary Prunicki on the growing evidence for wildfire smoke exacerbating COVID death counts

Rep. Lauren Underwood on Black women’s maternal mortality during the pandemic

Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson describes why the climate crisis is so much worse for women

And Jamie Henn celebrates marketers cutting ties with fossil fuels

Thanks for reading, and thanks for giving a shit. Have a great weekend.

-- Quinn