Quinn Emmett

November 12, 2021

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Welcome back, Shit Givers.

91 degrees on my birthday (🎉) in mid-November here in LA and that's fine, right?

Last week's most popular Action Step: you called a hell of a lot of Congresspeople to demand Pfizer and Moderna share COVID vaccine trade secrets with other manufacturers. Huzzah!

This Week: China takes on methane; Moderna's downturn; Inflated food costs; Measles on the rebound; Google's new drug company

Reminder: You can read this issue on the website, or you can listen to it on the podcast.

Together With A Little Green

In the face of an escalating climate crisis, what's it mean to do our part?

A Little Green is a helpful and short podcast series from Avocado Green Brands. Follow along as they demystify the questions many of us find ourselves asking these days, and show how we can each challenge the status quo and become climate leaders in our own communities.

Protecting our planet will take all of us. So let’s dig in — together!

Find A Little Green wherever you listen to your podcasts, or head to AvocadoMattress.com to learn more.

Featured

Do Better Better

Power systems don't just work on their own.

Sure, someone designed them, and constructed them, but they're not perpetual motion machines, this isn't about inertia, they don't just keep going like if you got nudged on a the one spacewalk where you forgot your jetpack and now you're drifting until either universal heat death or you run into...something.

There's always someone consciously using and benefiting from the system, but also, and more importantly, someone with their finger on the scale.

From election gerrymandering to global vaccine inequities to fossil fuel indoctrination by way of public school curriculums -- people and communities don't just exist within these mechanisms, they're done to them.

We're not moving too slowly against the climate crisis, we're being actively held back. Alex Steffen calls this "predatory delay", and it's spot on, and it's happening all the time.

Black people aren't vulnerable because they live next to coal plants and Superfund sites. They're actively marginalized and can't afford to live anywhere else, by forces sometimes outright, and often more insidiously weaved throughout the system.

The measure of any progress we've made reveals the enormity of the forces dedicated to profiting from the status quo.

Thus: Action Steps. We push back.

We find leverage, and we exploit it wherever we can.

We measure and perform Action Steps: to Do Better Better, to sustain us, to bring us together, to build momentum, and to build on that leverage wherever and whenever possible.

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CLIMATE CHANGE

A surprise pledge offers hope

The news: After repeatedly signaling their disinterest in joining a global methane pledge that hasn't got a lot of teeth, China joined the United States in a surprise bilateral agreement to take "concrete" measures to tackle methane, a key piece of fossil gas that traps more than 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide in its first 20 years in the atmosphere. Fun.

Understand it: Reducing methane emissions is relatively easy-peasy compared to, say, land-use from meat.

We can track leaks with fancy satellites, we can flood old mines to reduce emissions, and the cost of capital for fossil fuel projects is barreling towards a fairly untenable 20%.

China's coal-related methane emissions blow everybody else out of the water, so if meetings next year (sure, take your time) bear fruit, we could put a dent in new emissions, quick.

⚡️Action Step: Federal, state, and local stakeholders can use the Net-Zero America Project's quantified measures to decarbonize where it counts.

COVID

Moderna isn't making any new friends here

The news: On a chilly weekend in January 2020, US government scientists, government-funded scientists, and Moderna scientists put their heads together and sketched out the spike protein that's the key to the mRNA coronavirus vaccine.

But a year and a half later, and with just one commercial product available and a tanking stock price, Moderna's not interested in sharing its intellectual property to vastly increase global vaccine equity, the credit for creating the vaccine, or the proceeds.

And the NIH isn't having any of it.

Understand it: On top of the intellectual contributions allegedly made by government scientists, Moderna eventually received somewhere in the $2.5 billion range from a variety of US government agencies to develop and distribute the historic vaccine.

⚡️Action Step: Unless you work at the patent office (Hi! I have some fun ideas), your most effective Action Step this week is to call around and find ways to help support the 28 million kids aged 5-11 now eligible for vaccines (from Pfizer).

Call local schools and clinics to find out if and how you can volunteer to help out. Got a guitar? Ice cream truck? Paint brush? Half the battle is making kids feel comfortable and excited. What can you do? What can you do?

FOOD & WATER

It's expensive to be poor

The news: Whether inflation continues to be a thing as supply chains open back up (one day) and late-pandemic demand recedes, and/or the Fed intervenes, core items are pretty expensive in the United States right now, including food.

Understand it: As with any systemic issue, the canary on the coal mine is usually found somewhere on the frontlines. Sometimes it's coral reefs, this time it's food banks.

"Supply chain disruptions, lower inventory and labor shortages have all contributed to increased costs for charities on which tens of millions of people in the U.S. rely on for nutrition. Donated food is more expensive to move because transportation costs are up, and bottlenecks at factories and ports make it difficult to get goods of all kinds."

⚡️Action Step: Donate to and/or volunteer your time with a local food bank. You can do both through one of our favorite charities, Feeding America.

Have an Action Step to recommend? Just reply to this email or send the deets to questions@importantnotimportant.com, and we’ll check it out!

HEALTH & BIO

Less measles, please

The news: Our friend Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, infectious diseases physician and founding director of Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research at Boston University, published a piece this weekend around the decrease in childhood immunizations across the globe.

She's got concerns.

In the US, one 2020 poll showed 13 percentage point decline among Republicans regarding support for childhood vaccines, and this summer, the WHO reported that more than 23 million children worldwide missed first or follow-up routine immunizations in 2020.

Understand it: Vaccine hesitancy was a thing pre-COVID, and with the politicization of vaccines, the issue is growing more stark.

While wealthy west-side LA kids (and Americans in general) are less likely to suffer economically, childhood disease is a proven poverty trap that's preventable. It's a (stupid) policy choice.

⚡️Action Step: Donate to or volunteer with the Measles and Rubella Initiative to help pick up the slack. I can't think of a group more focused on being "better ancestors" than Shit Givers, and preventing childhood disease is a huge tool for doing just that. Let's go.

BEEP BOOP

Feels inevitable, might delete later

The news: For every new product Google/Alphabet launches, two more are cancelled. That's the rules (unless we're talking chat, in which case, good luck).

Amid a growing revolution in research and more holistic treatment in how we treat diseases and conditions like chronic pain, Alphabet has spun off another "bet" on health, and this time the effort, called Isomorphic Laboratories, is piggy-backing on DeepMind's protein-folding success, with a goal of applying deep learning to new drug discovery.

A reminder why the protein-folding reveal was so important: It hugely accelerated answering the question, "How the hell do proteins fold into shape over and over again, forming the building blocks of, you know, life itself?"

The next big challenge: training data. The protein-folding work relied on a massive set of open-source data, but big time pharmaceutical companies aren't going to be game for sharing whatever they've built over time.

The answer? Probably money. Good news: Isomorphic Labs' parent company is worth about $2 trillion.

⚡️Action Step: Isomorphic is hiring deep learning experts, computational biologists, medicinal chemists, biophysicists, and engineers. You can contact them here.

FROM MY NOTEBOOK

How the infrastructure bill starts to fix our busted water pipes
Why the hell don't we have a Lyme disease vaccine?
A bunch of open-source data and Google Earth are helping spot climate devastation
UK plug-in share is up to 23%. Gradually, and then suddenly, folks
SARS-CoV-2 is in deer, like a lot of deer, and really anyway you look at it, that's very bad
The HPV vaccine is a modern marvel, full-stop
John Oliver covered the power grid and I'm so excited
So is organic food bullshit? Maybe.
The Zillow house-buying fiasco shows why "AI" has a long way to go
Despite desertification, California's still growing almonds
As we barrel towards the Great Electrification, lithium is in very short supply
A correction is coming on fossil fuel assets
E-bike rebates are on the menu in the infrastructure bill. I LOVE mine.
CAR-T therapies blow standard blood cancer treatments away

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.