Quinn Emmett

October 2, 2021

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Welcome back, Shit Givers.

It’s a big day. A very big day.

Last week’s most popular Action Step was reading Charlie Warzel on what to do about Facebook.

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

NEW: I’m opening up INI to select sponsorship opportunities. We’ve got some awesome, impactful stuff brewing, and it’s time to pay for it. The bar for sponsorship is high, but if you’d like to get your company or product in front of your fellow Shit Givers, just reply to this email and we can discuss!

This Week: It’s Climate Day; How to defeat the next pandemic; Telehealth in red states; Is lab-grown meat a myth; Facebook’s very bad month continues

Do Better Better

James Clear, best-selling author of Atomic Habits, which I loved, said “Life instantly improves when you don’t blame other people and focus on what you can control.”

And he’s totally right.

Great news: One of the things you control is your vote.

Even better news, among alllllllll the Action Steps we vet and offer here, voting is maybe the most impactful of all.

Some context:

When you open a restaurant, paint a painting, or write a book or produce a movie, you’re implicitly opening your work to criticism. That’s the deal. Hopefully critics don’t make it personal. But with one comes the other. Them’s the apples.

Running for office goes even further.

You’re not just running for office, you’re explicitly campaigning in a specific geography to represent the needs and wishes of the people who live in that area.

And if you don’t actually fulfill that job, you’re going to get blamed, and if you’re my rep, at whatever level, I’m going to focus on controlling your demise.

I’m going to focus my very limited bandwidth, but extensive soapbox, on removing you from said office and installing someone who will actually fight to build a cleaner, better world (or town, or school board, or whatever) -- for everyone.

So yeah, all you can do is all you can do. But remember -- sometimes all you can do is a hell of a lot.

And together? We can change the fucking world.

Climate Change & Clean Energy

Up in the air

The latest: Late last night, the House Democrats not entirely in the pocket of corporate interests told Speaker Pelosi that they wouldn’t vote for the smaller infrastructure (mostly roads) bill without an agreement on the larger climate and people (reconciliation) bill, as advertised.

This morning, they’re still working it out, and Nancy’s trying to get the vote done today.

Analysis: I really don’t think nothing gets done. No one’s going to be completely happy (least of all me, so fun), but if America comes out of all of this with:

(The big one) a Clean Electricity Payment Program
Robust tax credits for EV’s, transmission, buildings, and carbon capture
Offshore wind lease improvements
A Civilian Climate Corps

....I think we’re in good shape.

I think.

Have no doubt: Without these things, slowing global warming will be much more difficult. The clock’s ticking.

But the Green Vortex is working, and the writing’s on the wall for fossil fuels.

⚡️ Action Step: For perhaps the last time, use Call4Climate to call your reps right now. They’re in Washington right this minute hashing out the final details.

Control what you can control, and be heard in our last best moment to affect great change.

COVID

The easy answers

We’ve been over this: I’ve written extensively about how the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and accompanying COVID-19 pandemic, were a pop quiz for every choice we’ve made to date: from political power systems, to public health infrastructure, from housing inequality to paid sick leave to childcare and pharmaceutical pipelines to for-profit hospitals.

When your “N” is every person on Earth, every system you’ve built is suddenly put on blast.

I’ve also (I hope) helped you think through the idea -- through the newsletter, but also through conversations with friends and scientists like Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, Dr. Sam Scarpino, and more -- that we should use the (very, very poor) results of this pop quiz to prepare for the next pandemic.

TLDR: we’re not really doing that. But that’s not really surprising. We don’t really pay attention to wildfires or hurricanes, either, unless they’re on the way, or here, and then we throw some emergency cash at them and...move on.

There’s simple solutions (increased ventilation everywhere right meow) we can take, and more complex ones (200,000 more nurses; better and more data; a robust pathogen tracking system, for just a few examples) to figure out.

Los Angeles is a great example of how we’re ignoring the hard stuff.

Absolutely punished last winter to the tune of at least 30,000 COVID-related deaths (and many more with “long COVID”), the county is trending up for vaccination rates -- but what’s been done to address the vast, underlying inequities that destroyed so many families?

It’s the every day struggles of millions of families like those, across LA and West Virginia and Queens and Alabama and Florida, with three generations in an apartment, who work in hourly, low-wage, shoulder to shoulder jobs, that add up when a pandemic strikes.

I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but a vaccine is not a seat belt, like a virus is not a single-person car accident. The choices you make affect me; the choices our policymakers make affect us all.

And so maybe instead of asking why we had to develop groundbreaking vaccines in historic time, we should be asking whether there should be cars on the road at all.

⚡️ Action Step: Let’s elect people to office who get it, who give a shit, who will build a social safety net, who are young, and progressive.

Support Run for Something candidates here, or run yourself.

Medicine & Biotech

Telehealth and remote trials and lions, oh by

57 million people: That’s how many Americans live in “rural” parts of the country, and who have outsized voting influence in the Senate.

And -- to tie those two factors together -- that’s how many people could benefit from a soup-to-nuts telehealth infrastructure.

It works. People love it. And now they’re terrified they’ll lose it.

So why won’t senators who represent rural states vote for it?

Define “infrastructure”: To start, it includes vastly more broadband access, licensing regulations, clinician training, data standardization and sharing rules, equipment subsidies, education campaigns, and equal reimbursement rates for medical providers.

The Biden administration is throwing $20 million at the problem, but that’s not going to cut it. If we’re going to keep refusing to building an entirely new social structure focused on wellness, the least we can do is -- literally -- meet sick people where they are, but over the phone.

⚡️ Action Step: Use Common Cause to call your reps and demand they support the “CONNECT for Health Act” and H.R. 4480, “The Telehealth Coverage and Payment Parity Act”, as part of the reconciliation bill.

Job of the Week

Sustainable home upgrades, made easy

Product Manager, Goodleap (Remote)

Goodleap partners with sustainable home improvement professionals across the country to make sustainable home upgrades simple, with flexible payment options that fit any budget.

As a Product Manager, you’ll use some serious data to work closely with senior leaders on strategy, scale, and execution, across UX, sales, marketing, engineering, and more.

Apply right here.

Food & Water

Lab-grown meat is the future, or it isn’t

Understand this: Meat’s a...problem. There’s a few ways we can fix it, including subsidizing, growing, and eating more legumes; eating more plant-based meat; and eating lab-grown meat that’s actually meat, just without, you know, bulldozing the Amazon.

But what if the last option is actually just smoke?

From The Counter:

“Open Philanthropy—a multi-faceted research and investment entity with a nonprofit grant-making arm, which is also one of GFI’s biggest funders—completed a much more robust TEA of its own, one that concluded cell-cultured meat will likely never be a cost-competitive food. David Humbird, the UC Berkeley-trained chemical engineer who spent over two years researching the report, found that the cell-culture process will be plagued by extreme, intractable technical challenges at food scale. In an extensive series of interviews with The Counter, he said it was “hard to find an angle that wasn’t a ludicrous dead end.”

On the other hand: The necessity, the hype, and the many fundamental, systemic issues with the premise remind me of these early days of carbon capture.

Sure, the tech works-ish. But scaling it, at cost, is either going to be very, very slow and difficult -- or require huge (huge) amounts of government money.

TO be clear, I’m fully game to elect people who will spend that type of money, because, you know, code red for humanity, etc, and also that’s how we got GPS, and solar.

There will be failures along the way. But if venture capital (of which I’m part of) can proudly bat .100 on social networks, flying cars, and life-extension bullshit, governments should be able to do the same for long-shot 80/20 climate fixes.

⚡️ Action Step: Get deeper context on lab-grown meat and read the whole article here (20 minutes).

The Human-Machine Interface

2.9 billion monthly active users

We’re still talking about Facebook: Why? Because of the Wall Street Journal’s incredible reporting this month.

And because, as Adrienne LaFrance put it in The Atlantic:

“Facebook is...a hostile foreign power. This is plain to see in its single-minded focus on its own expansion; its immunity to any sense of civic obligation; its record of facilitating the undermining of elections; its antipathy toward the free press; its rulers’ callousness and hubris; and its indifference to the endurance of American democracy.”

Its relentless focus on expansion at the expense of everything above also includes teenage girls, among others. From the WSJ:

For the past three years, Facebook has been conducting studies into how its photo-sharing app affects its millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company’s researchers found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls.

“We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” said one slide from 2019, summarizing research about teen girls who experience the issues.

“Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression,” said another slide. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

What it means: It means they’re testifying to Congress, because a whistleblower has (thousands of pages of) receipts, and they’re not great, Bob.

⚡️ Action Step: Do it for the kids. Use Common Cause to insist your reps support Senator Markey’s KIDS Act, which would ban auto-play, push-alerts, badges, harmful content, and manipulative marketing for children under 16.

The Round Up

Merck’s new COVID antiviral pill cuts risk of hospitalization or death in half, hopefully won’t tank vaccination rates

Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin to team up for EV charging network

Can wearables predict the flu?

Machine learning is heavily dependent on refugees (sigh)

Ford will spend $11 billion on electric truck and battery plants. Your move, GM.

Now we can check how healthy soil microbes are

CRISPR improved one patient’s vision -- but it’s got a long way to go

Norway’s $1.4 trillion wealth fund will mandate strict CO2 thresholds

Sure, DeepMind can kick your ass in Go, but can it predict the rain?

This is how cheap solar has gotten

Is this the Fed’s climate stress test?

Where and why Americans are moving into fire-risky areas

COVID stuff:

Most home care workers aren’t required to get the COVID vaccine, which feels like a mistake
Schools with mask mandates are WAY safer
Meanwhile, some school systems can afford to test all their kids. Most cannot.
Right-wing health care providers are making bank off hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin
COVID rapid tests are in abhorrently short supply STILL
YouTube will ban all anti-vaxx content
How do we reach the unvaccinated, but willing?