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This Week, Summarized:

• Putin's oil, rejected
• The lives we write off
• What "sustainable" really means, or, nothing
• Lead pipes, still
• Microsoft's new cancer bot

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

🕛 Reading Time: 10 minutes

CLIMATE CHANGE

Unsplash/Dean Brierley

How to get off oil, but for real this time

The news: President Biden announced this week a ban on imports of Russian oil, fossil gas, and coal (and vodka!)

For context, less than 10% of America's energy supply -- just 700,000 barrels a day --comes from Russian oil, compared to the EU, which imports 4 million barrels a day, much of it for heating. None of it comes from vodka.

Have no doubt, the fossil fuel ban will result in higher gas prices at home, which means low-income folks and people and companies that rely on transportation for their business are going to have an even tougher ride of things than they already are -- and that's just not going to go well in the November elections for Democrats.

In the meantime, the EU took a bigger hit and announced plans to reduce dependence on Russian natural gas by two-thirds by next year, and all Russian fuels by 2027, which would help cut off Putin's once and future war machine where it counts.

Because ESG means both nothing and everything and time is a flat circle, lost in all this is you: You, in fact, may be among the many who noticed your portfolio was a bit more exposed to, well, not-ESG than you thought.

The long-term answer is to electrify fucking everything we can find, to bury petro autocrats once and for all. And you know what would help accelerate the hell out of that transition?

Heat pumps.

Understand it: To be crystal clear, more drilling and fracking at home isn't going to make any of this go away. Why not?

• Oil companies are sitting on thousands of unused leases as it is
• It takes 4 years to spin up new gas terminals, and existing ones are at current capacity
• Oil companies, unexpectedly profitable again, have already said they're not up for producing more

So: heat pumps. Sort of weirdly named, they are preposterously efficient, run on electricity, and replace your A/C and heat -- for the latter, they absorb heat from the air outside our house and use it to warm the inside.

They're a goddamn delight, and save you a boatload of cash in the long-run.

And Europe and the US could use a hell of a lot of them -- so the Biden administration is actually considering producing exactly that many to send abroad.

Because however batshit Putin may be, whatever his reasons for war, he is a symptom of a greater plague: two centuries of geopolitics built on a finite resource that enriches suppliers, explodes (often), and fuels massive carbon emissions, all the way down the supply chain.

We need disclosure regulations, building codes, and to price fossil fuels accordingly, for sure; we need carrots and rebates, no doubt; but we also need to look at what Putin is doing to Ukraine, to look at Mohammed bin Salman and Nicolás Maduro, what air pollution is doing to millions, and say "Yeah, we're just not going to fucking do this anymore."

⚡️Action Step: Build Back Better was/is supposed to subsidize heat pumps, but if you can afford to make the switch now, or need to because your ancient A/C is definitely going to die on the hottest day of summer, check out Carbon Switch's excellent guide to buying a heat pump.

COVID

Unsplash/Engin Akyurt

Vaccine equity update: Just 13% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose, and 36.8% of people worldwide have received no doses.

The things we write off

The news: Mask mandates are gone, and so is COVID funding.

Boosters (however excellent) and vaccine equity are mostly flat, and cases are skyrocketing in countries that nailed social distancing but lag behind on vaccines.

What else?

Kids' vaccines are holding up as well as adults', which is good, because COVID causes heart damage and might cause some slight brain damage, and oh yeah, we've normalized a million deaths.

From Ed Yong:

"The United States reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic."

Listen: COVID, and climate, and war, they're not about viruses, or carbon, or tanks. They're about us.

After Katrina, after 9/11, we promised ourselves: Never again. We made some big changes, didn't change some other stuff. Over time we normalized taking our shoes off at the airport, massive domestic surveillance, and more.

After Sandy Hook, we normalized...well. You get the point.

I think about this virus the way I think about methane. You've interacted with it more than you think, but you can't actually see it.

Most of us haven't used fancy new satellites to see and track methane plumes, or calculated the cumulative devastation of a gas that is 25x more potent as carbon dioxide at trapping heat in our precious atmosphere. A gas that is deadly to us, right now, all the time, even if we literally don't see it that way.

And so we've accepted fossil gas as relatively less bad than, say, coal, despite the leaks, the explosions, and the unprofitability.

It's just easier for most of us to have cheap fuel, it's easier for companies to buy carbon offsets instead of decarbonizing at all, like it's just as easy to get a few vaccines and stop wearing masks, because the dead were mostly among the retired and marginalized, because immunocompromised people who are still in danger are still trapped at home, unseen, or under 5, or thousands of miles away, unvaccinated.

We have decided as a Western people what we will tolerate and who is expendable because we have never calculated, much less paid for, the true costs of our lifestyle, our fuels, our guns, our diets, and freedom.

We have to do the unsexy stuff, too: Expanding paid leave, recruiting community health workers, making tests ubiquitous, reinventing ventilation, subsidizing air filters, expanding broadband for remote work, vaccinating the rest of the world, catching up on vaccines, ourselves, and electing people to office who simply want to care for one another.

I refuse to believe that this country can remain steadfastly uninterested in providing bootstraps to anyone who didn't inherit them at birth, and conversely, in taking them away from the people who need them the most.

We simply cannot do these things and still flourish through what's coming down the pipe.

The good news? Most people want a way better future, we just need to say it loud, to each other, and build actions and communities on top of that desire. The time to Do Better Better is now, and I'm thankful every day you're with us.

⚡️Action Step: Read Drs. Céline Gounder and Robert Putnam on how to build out community health before the next pandemic hits.

FOOD & WATER

Unsplash/nrd

Greenwashing is less fun than it sounds

The news: Greenwashing is everywhere, from oil wells to your portfolio all the way to the milk aisle.

(And if you're like me, the latter two collide (full disclosure!) in an early investment in Ripple Foods, including milk made from peas).

Understand it: Greenwashing -- spinning products from t-shirts to trash bags to fossil fuels to be more "environmentally friendly" than they are -- is not only misleading, it's dangerous. It makes customers skeptical of all claims, even the good ones, a result that is profoundly unhelpful.

There's another 5000 words to write about how one agency, the FDA, regulates both nutrition labels and COVID tests, but the important part here is that labels like "sustainable" follow in the footsteps of old favorites like "all natural".

What's new: Marketers know the game is up.

From Campaign:

"As industry regulations tighten around sustainability, half (49%) of marketers have admitted they are wary of working on sustainability marketing campaigns, fearing their company or clients might be accused of "greenwashing".

Meanwhile, more than half (55%) of marketers' companies and clients recognise sustainability as a business priority, with 51% saying that climate change could threaten the very existence of their business or clients."

Progress is coming, if incrementally. The UK has taken measures lately to explain exactly how environmental claims can be legally made, and this year the FTC's "Green Guides" will finally get updated.

⚡️Action Step: Are you an advertiser or marketer? Check out Clean Creatives, and take the pledge to refuse to work with fossil fuel companies or their support groups.

HEALTH & BIO

Unsplash/Anandan Anandan

A "lead"ing headline

The news: Lead exposure from gasoline may have shrank the IQ scores for half of all Americans.

Lead was once everywhere, but for the better part of the 20th century, it was in gasoline, and folks born in the 60's and 70's, especially, breathed a hell of a lot of it.

Understand it: Lead is definitively no bueno. It's so dangerous to brains and bodies that researchers say there is no safe level of exposure.

We removed lead from gas in the 90's, but -- like air pollution -- it's still everywhere, and especially in redlined Black and Brown neighborhoods.

It's still in millions of water pipes across all 50 states. The Biden administration would love to remove those ASAP, but funding has been hard to come by, despite clear benefits to children, adults, and the economy.

⚡️Action Step: Work with local or state health or infrastructure authorities? Join the EPA's clean water pipes webinar on March 16th and find out how the infrastructure law's $43 billion can be put to use in your community.

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BEEP BOOP

Unsplash/CDC

Hey Siri, do I have cancer in this picture?

The news: IBM's Watson experiment might be dead, but Microsoft is all-in on health AI.

STAT News reported this week that Microsoft forked over $16 billy for Nuance Communications, and aims to use its speech recognition and other heralded AI/ML tools to do things like make radiology image sorting and records admin drastically more efficient.

Understand it: What makes this situation different from, again, Watson's, is a reported 80% of radiologists in the US already use Nuance, so -- theoretically -- they could "run algorithms against every chest CT in the country" and make some serious progress against lung cancer.

From Watson to Epic, AI has a ways to go. The path from "always-listening chat bot that dangerously misinterpreted a text to my wife" to "health platform that measurably saves lives" has been an arduous one, but I believe tools like these can do net good, if expectations are appropriate, and implemented ethically.

⚡️Action Step: Ethically, you say? What a perfect moment to dial into my fascinating conversation with Abhishek Gupta, mastermind of AI ethics at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute.

10 THINGS FROM MY NOTEBOOK

• This Black founded startup wants to help folks find cheaper groceries
  
• Facebook's man with all the influence -- it's not who you think
• Coal mines go solar in Virginia
  
• Where are all those battery breakthroughs, anyways?
• London's expanding their ultra-low emission zone to "everywhere"
• The FDA wants cancer trials to include more elderly folks
• Why was cleaning up the ocean's garbage patches a bad idea?
• Chinese minister warns of worst wheat crop in history
• The Vatican launched an online platform to help Catholics fight climate change is not something I thought I'd type today
• Muscle strengthening might reduce risk of death from...all causes? Like, what about, I don't know, sharks, or lightsabers? Yeah I guess it applies to those, too. Fascinating.
  
  

I appreciate you having a quick go at the quick referrals survey. I want to give you what's going to provide the most value to you, and the best way to do that is just to ask!

Thanks as always for reading, and thanks for giving a shit.

Have a safe weekend.

-- Quinn