Quinn Emmett

February 18, 2022

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Welcome back, Shit Givers.

I know this is why you're here, but a reminder: The future is ours to write.

This Week, Summarized:

America will see an average of 12 inches of sea level rise by 2050
1 million COVID deaths
$1 billion for cover crops
Antimicrobial resistance got next
Clearview's next steps (to harvest your data)

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

🕛 Reading Time: 9 minutes

CLIMATE CHANGE

The water will come

The news: Sea levels along the coastal United States will rise by a foot or more (depending on location) by 2050 -- as much as they've grown in the last 100 years.

The future is here, and it's accelerating. The New York Times reported "moderate or typically damaging flooding will occur 10 times more often by 2050 than it does today."

Understand it: The next 30 years of sea levels rise are more or less locked in, and it's going to affect everything, from real estate to insurance to basic infrastructure.

In Boston, sea level rise could reach 16 inches.
In Miami, basically everything -- including the invaluable but precariously located Turkey Point nuclear power plant -- is under threat thanks to underlying terrain made from limestone swiss cheese.
In New York, sea level rise could be two feet by 2055.

But here's the thing: Talking about inches of sea level rise is like talking about degrees of warming. What are the real world implications?

Well, total damages from floods and hurricanes last year cost $100 billy. 13% of all US properties already face "almost certain" risk of flooding. So we're just getting warmed up.

From Grist:

"A new study published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change projects that the number of people in the U.S. who are exposed to flooding will almost double over the next 30 years."

And that number is driven -- like the wildfires out west -- by population growth in zones already vulnerable to flooding.

One would think this is where the insurance industry steps in and freaks out, but not quite.

Most flood insurance comes by way of the federal government, while fire insurance is mostly private (except for those in California who are refused and have to buy the FAIR plan).

And whereas fire insurers have been freaking out for years, the NOAA is mostly relying on rainfall reports that are often 50 years old and so the insurance policies built on them are, at best, completely lacking.

Homeowners are locked into mortgages for homes that never should have been built.

We just keep building where we shouldn't, and at some point, it's gotta stop.

Nothing in the future will be equitable, unless we make it so. From Nature: "The future increase in risk will disproportionately impact Black communities, while remaining concentrated on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts."

Bloomberg's 2021 investigation showed historically red-lined neighborhoods already suffer the most, and The Intercept cross-referenced 6500 carceral facilities across these fruited plains to find crumbling structures and people under constant threat from hurricanes, extreme rain, and rising seas.

Looking further out: An additional foot of sea level rise is possible by 2100, but there's still a hell of a lot we can do to slow that down.

Flooding and fires aren't going to go away because we refuse to account for them. We have to Do Better Better.

⚡️Action Step: Find your home's flood risk (and so much more) at First Street Foundation.

COVID

Unsplash/Joshua Hoehne

Vaccine equity update: Just 10.6% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose, and 38.1% of people worldwide have received no doses.

Bootstraps for a pandemic

The news: America has passed 1 million excess deaths since the pandemic began, and with Omicron cases and hospitalizations counts falling, mask mandates are falling, too, despite over 3000 deaths again yesterday.

1 million deaths. Twenty-one months ago, The New York Times called 100,000 deaths an "incalculable loss." What's ten times that?

And yet: People and policymakers are increasingly ready to "move on." But who's being left behind?

7 million immunocompromised people, to start, many of whom don't respond to vaccines.

Understand it: From the irreplaceable Ed Yong:

"Close to 3 percent of U.S. adults take immunosuppressive drugs, either to treat cancers or autoimmune disorders or to stop their body from rejecting transplanted organs or stem cells. That makes at least 7 million immunocompromised people—a number that’s already larger than the populations of 36 states, without even including the millions more who have diseases that also hamper immunity, such as AIDS and at least 450 genetic disorders."

Who else are we leaving behind? Hourly workers without paid sick leave, young children without vaccines, almost a hundred million more with underlying conditions that make a potential COVID infection more severe.

We've spent decades building accommodations for disabled people, to enable a more accessible every-day life. Why aren't we doing the same for those still more vulnerable to COVID?

Perhaps the wealthiest country in history, which is also among the last in maternal health outcomes, which has spent four centuries enslaving and marginalizing Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous people, whose inequality is peaking at a 50 year high, and which doesn't guarantee parental leave, shouldn't be the measuring stick for equitable protection.

As Dr. Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and a longtime AIDS activist put it: "What would it mean to move into a future in which a common fate mattered as much as our own? It would mean no one was disposable."

COVID isn't done with us, however done with it we may be, however able some of us may be to survive it.

In this approaching post-Omicron lull, we need to vaccine the world, to combat misinformation, we need better ventilation, more tests, sick leave, more nurses (and doctors and nurses of color), and better forecasting.

Like climate, we need to do it all.

We have to return to a model of thinking that isn't just about your health, but about public health.

⚡️Action Step: Read Ed's article in full.

FOOD & WATER

Unsplash/Ant Rozetsky

Let's fix farming, shall we?

The news: The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced $1 billion towards pilot projects around "cover crops, low-till or no-till farming, agroforestry, rotational grazing, and reforestation" -- or as they're calling them, "climate-smart commodities." Ok!

The project proposes to do its homework, throwing cash at the tools' ability to not only build markets, but also to "measure, monitor, and verify" whether they, you know, actually draw down carbon in any meaningful way.

Understand it: According to US Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack, "We want a broad array of agriculture and forestry to see themselves in this effort, including small and historically underserved producers as well as early adopters.”

The quiet part out loud: 98% of rural land in the US is owned by white people, most of whom are Boomers or older, and well, the receipts are in.

Monocrops, industrial agriculture, and the climate crisis have left soil nutrients depleted, and droughts and flooding threaten what's left. And despite increasing evidence of the proliferation and potency of methane re: global warming, beef and dairy cattle (27% of US methane emissions) aren't under the microscope as much as say, fossil gas.

The more we can measure a problem like this one, the more we can hold corporations accountable -- and slow warming at the same time.

⚡️Action Step: Basically everyone can apply, from state and local governments to small businesses, nonprofits, tribal organizations and governments, and more. The first round of applications for large-scale projects ($5m-$100 million), is due April 8th. The second round ($250k+) is due late May. More details here!

(Please) come help me (make memes and) build a better future. Apply to be my #2 right here.

HEALTH & BIO

Unsplash/Michael Schiffer

I've put this off for long enough

The news: One pandemic at a time is enough for even a Shit Giver, but life just keeps on keepin' on. All we can choose is how we react to it. Deep breath.

From The Guardian:

"Antimicrobial resistance poses a significant threat to humanity, health leaders have warned, as a study reveals it has become a leading cause of death worldwide and is killing about 3,500 people every day.

More than 1.2 million – and potentially millions more – died in 2019 as a direct result of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, according to the most comprehensive estimate to date of the global impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR)."

Understand it: Like COVID, that figure jumps up to almost 5 million deaths a year once you count folks who had an antibiotic-resistant infection but didn't clearly die of it.

Either way, it's now more than HIV/AIDS and malaria, and that's not a group you want to be in.

A quick reminder: Antibiotics changed the world. They were probably the single biggest difference between World War I and World War II.

Overuse of one of our wonderful antibiotics, whether after a WWII strafing run, for your sinus infection, or because we keep pumping cocktails of them into livestock you then eat, results in bacteria (OG on planet earth) quickly adapting to those same wonder drugs, which makes those drugs less effective, which suddenly makes paper cuts once again as scary as that scene in Master and Commander where they had to cut the kid's leg off.

⚡️Action Step: Join the Center for Food Safety's campaign to hold McDonald's accountable for still giving drugs to cows.

BEEP BOOP

Unsplash/Arthur Mazi

But how will I know you

The news: Over the past few weeks, we've harped on the IRS's requirement for users to scan their face with ID.me, and what it means for AI ethics:

It's unnecessary, a privacy nightmare, and probably horribly biased
It's unnecessary, but also data security is a nightmare, and today it's
Sure, ID.me isn't great, but have you met Clearview?"

From The Washington Post:

"(They are) on track to have 100 billion facial photos in (their) database within a year, enough to ensure “almost everyone in the world will be identifiable,” according to a financial presentation from December obtained by The Washington Post.

[...] The company wants to expand beyond scanning faces for the police, saying in the presentation that it could monitor “gig economy” workers and is researching a number of new technologies that could identify someone based on how they walk, detect their location from a photo or scan their fingerprints from afar."

Understand it: Clearview has built up their database by scraping your image and 900-plus billion others from social networks without asking for permission from anyone, period, and selling their tool to police forces, ICE, the FBI, and (way) more.

They're also being sued like everywhere. In fact, their image stealing is so prevalent that Facebook (Facebook!) has banned them.

⚡️Action Step: Use Common Cause to call your reps and demand they support the "Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale" act, which is a real thing, and much needed.