I always read them and heart them. Good news just doesn’t seem to generate vigorous debate apparently.
On the flip side you have whatever the hell is going on in the covid thread and I assume the 232,566 mod threads that I’ve muted.
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I’ve often thought these type A techie guys who spend every free second listening to podcasts on 3x speed are missing the forest for the trees. You need some time to just piddle.
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I read this thread, I guess I don’t really engage with it beyond that.
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Yeah - I mean it doesn’t bother me if there isn’t discussion in here or whatever (I don’t really do that much myself). There were just some previous posts that - at the time - got 1/2 likes, and that happens a few times in a row and I just felt like “ok…this isn’t really content that is valued.” Which again is fine, just didn’t make sense for me to keep bumping this thread to the top if that was the case.
Appreciate the recent feedback that let me know this was being read more than was obvious. I’ll keep the good news coming :-)
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Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
A Black Wednesday for the oil industry, after a triple whammy of historic blows. Exxon Mobil lost a fight with shareholders last week over its reluctance to account for climate change, while Chevron’s investors instructed the company to cut its emissions, and a Dutch court ordered Shell to slash emissions by 45% by 2030. “There’s no going back to where things were for oil and natural gas.” Politico
Eight Australian high school students and a Catholic nun may have doomed coal’s future, following a court ruling that the federal environment minister has a duty of care to avoid harm to young people from climate change. This is an even bigger deal that the Shell ruling, because Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coking coal and the second-largest for thermal coal. Reuters
The world’s seven largest advanced economies have agreed to stop international financing of coal projects that emit carbon by the end of this year, and phase out support for all fossil fuels. This announcement leaves China isolated as the lender of last resort for promoters of new international coal projects. ABC
It’s adiós to oil and gas drilling in Spain, following new legislation requiring the complete phase out of fossil fuel production by 2042. Sales of ICE vehicles will be banned by 2040, and 74% of the country’s electricity must be renewable by 2030. Spain joins Denmark, France and Ireland in legislating the EU’s target of carbon neutrality by 2050. Grist
South Korea’s $774.1 billion National Pension Service, the third largest pension fund in the world, will cease investments related to the construction of coal-fired power plants at home and abroad. That’s the 51st coal exit policy from a financial institution announced this year, a 61% increase over 2020. Pensions & Investments
One fifth of all cars rolling off the production lines in Germany are now hybrid or electric. This is an astonishing change for the fourth largest maker of cars in the world - manufacturers are now producing 74,000 EVs a month, and Volkswagen is now the third largest EV maker in the world after Tesla and Renault-Nissan. The Driven
Why do all of these stories matter? They matter because they show the tide has turned. The fossil fuels industry is now firmly on the wrong side of both history and company balance sheets and there’s nowhere else left to run. Carbon needs to be accounted for, there is no escaping it. The science has been telling us, our experience of wildfires, freak summers and extended winters has been telling us, and now finally, the mood music is telling us, from the courtrooms of The Hague to the boardrooms of Seoul and the factory lines of Zwickau.
We’ve been singing this tune in this newsletter for years now, and to finally see both the economic and political realities catch up to the scientific and technological ones feels a little unreal, and incredibly hopeful. Plenty more of this kind of thing still to come, we’ll keep you up to date with all of it right here.
Good news you probably didn’t hear about
A new report from the WHO says there were 1.5 million new HIV infections in 2020, a decline of 30% since 2010, and the lowest total number since 1990. The UN’s 90-90-90 targets are inching closer: 81% of people living with HIV know their status, 67% are receiving ARVs (up from 20% in 2010), 59% have suppressed viral loads, and 85% of pregnant women are receiving ARVs. Mirage
The same report says that 9.4 million people around the world are now receiving treatment for Hepatitis C, an almost 10-fold increase from the baseline of one million at the end of 2015. This scale-up of treatment has been sufficient to reverse the global trend of increasing mortality from Hepatitis C for the first time ever. ReliefWeb
The US government has put an end to the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols — known as the “Remain in Mexico” program, requiring asylum seekers to return to Mexico until their court dates in the United States. Advocates are calling it a “huge victory” that will save thousands of innocent people from squalid conditions and extortion, sexual assault, and kidnapping. Common Dreams
Ecuador has become the latest country in Latin America to be swept up in the ‘green wave’ abortion rights movement, following a ruling by the country’s Constitutional Court decriminalizing abortion in cases of rape. “Never again will women be threatened with jail time, preventing them from making decisions about their reproductive life." Al Jazeera
Prisons across America are being repurposed into homeless shelters, educational farms, and even movie studios as years of declining crime rates force prison closures. Thanks to alternative penalties for non-violent crimes, the number of people incarcerated in the United States in 2020 plummeted by 1.7 million from 2019. AP
The danger in having prisons that are not either repurposed or, to be honest, torn down, is that there will always be an incentive to lock more people up - Nicole Porter | The Sentencing Project
Nicole D. Porter manages The Sentencing Project’s state and local advocacy efforts on sentencing reform, voting rights, and eliminating racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
The only home we’ve ever known
The US government has suspended all drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the country’s largest tracts of untouched wilderness, and home to migrating waterfowl, caribou and polar bears. It’s a big win for environmental groups and First Nations people who have campaigned to stop drilling for decades. NYT
Six years after the toxic haze crisis, the Indonesian government has restored more than 2 million hectares of damaged, carbon-rich peatlands and enhanced protection of the country’s mangroves. The policy reset was driven by environmentalists who demanded action to curb fires, and last year, the country achieved its fourth consecutive year of decline in deforestation. Reuters
Glasgow has given the green light to a plan to create a massive urban forest consisting of 18 million trees in and around the city over the next 10 years. The Clyde Climate Forest will be planted in streets, former industrial or mining areas, as well as in the countryside and on the edges of farming land, increasing forest cover in the area from 17% to 20%. BBC
60 organizations, including Coles, Woolworths, Nestle and Coca-Cola have signed an ANZPAC plastics pact, that will make all plastic packaging in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025. This landmark intervention comes after three years of negotiations and will drastically reduce the amount of waste that ends up in landfill and the ocean each year. ABC
The population of the critically endangered Saiga antelope in Kazakhstan has more than doubled to 842,000 since 2019. It’s a massive rebound for a species that made international headlines in 2015 after 200,000 animals died from a nasal bacterium spread in unusually warm weather. France24
The Florida panther has rebounded from a population of 20 to 200 in three decades. The long road to recovery began in 1995 with legislation for a genetic restoration plan, and just received another big boost from lawmakers with $100 million for land conversation and to build highway underpasses along migration corridors. NPR
This is a conservation success story that belongs to Florida and Floridians, and can be a real model of nature and people working together - Carlton Ward Jr | National Geographic photographer
A male panther leaps over a creek at Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Florida. Image credit: Carlton Ward
Indistinguishable from magic
Apparently IBM didn’t get the Moore’s Law Is Dead memo. They’ve just created the first 2 nanometre chip - 50 billion transistors on a chip the size of a fingernail. These chips are still a few years away from arriving in our laptops and phones, but when they do they’ll provide a 45% performance boost, and four times the battery life. Engadget
Canadian researchers have trained a machine-learning model on routine data like BMI and blood pressure from 1.7 million patients, to predict type 2 diabetes with an accuracy rate of 80%. Using this kind of technology in real life clinical settings obviously raises plenty of ethical and privacy issues, but if done with care gives doctors a powerful new diagnostic tool for the future. CTV
A self driving truck just transported a load of watermelons 1,528 km from Arizona to Oklahoma ten hours faster than the legal limit for human drivers. A human drove for 20% of the trip, while a machine did the other 80%. We’ve been doing this with planes for a while (commercial pilots fly an average of six minutes per flight). Stands to reason long distance trucking would be next. IE
Google and Harvard researchers just created the most detailed map yet of the cerebral cortex, containing 50,000 cells and 130 million synapses. It’s an amazing achievement that reveals just how complex the brain is: the sample was 1 mm3, a millionth the size of an adult brain, yet generated 1.4 petabytes of data, which is insanely large, and only really analyzable thanks to machine learning. New Atlas
This one is pure sci-fi, no idea why it wasn’t front page news everywhere. Scientists in Europe and the US have successfully restored human vision by taking the genetic instructions for a protein from light-sensing algae, and placing it into a blind person’s eye, giving them the ability to distinguish light and dark, and make out basic shapes. Say hello to optogenetics “a new field is being born.” STAT
Have you ever wondered how rockets actually get to space? Check out this amazing visualization of real time fuel burn for (from left-to-right) the Saturn V, the Space Shuttle, Falcon Heavy and the Space Launch System. The attention to detail in the full video is worth checking out. Sometimes, a picture really does say a thousand words. Youtube
Red = Kerosene | Orange = Liquid Hydrogen | Blue = Liquid Oxygen
Information superhighway
Raquel Benedict has a very, very good point. Whatever happened to sex in movies? The bodies have gotten more beautiful, but nobody seems horny any more, except for fighting. Bonus points for Starship Trooper s reference and also for introducing us to the publication we never knew we needed: Blood Knife “a digital magazine about sci-fi, horror, and capitalism.”
There’s an entire genre on the internet now where bewildered GenXer/millennial visits TikTok Hype House and is horrified/amazed/makes obligatory Andy Warhol reference. There’s a long historical tradition too, the fabled “Great Man amongst the youth" essay. Even so, Barrett Swanson’s overwritten account of his descent into the madness is compelling reading. This cannot end well. Harpers
Speaking of GenXers, Johnny Knoxville is now 50 years old. How on earth did that happen? This unexpectedly poignant profile shows that given enough time, anyone can become a national treasure. Reading this, we couldn’t help thinking that a willingness to deliberately inflict pain on ourselves might be one of the most human qualities of all. GQ
A fresh take on the age-old question “ Who am I?” Kathleen Wallace explores the concept of the Network Self, which views a person as an ever-changing, inter-relational set of social, physical, genetic, emotional, and biological processes . There’s an answer here to why knowing ourselves is a constantly evolving question, and a great new framework for thinking about personal growth. Aeon
Heart-breaking and beautiful. Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology, and the primary inspiration for Richard Powers’s The Overstory , tells her own story, of chasing wolves through the forests of British Columbia while pregnant. Woven through, her dawning discovery that trees share not just mycorrhizal networks amongst their roots, but actual carbon too. Neoma
Did you know there’s an entire subculture of photography dedicated to the Milky Way? Yeah, neither did we. Check out these astonishing pictures from the 2021 Milky Way Photographer of the Year, a journey from the remote deserts of the American Wild West to the unfamiliar landscapes of the Australian Outback, passing by spectacular glaciers, volcanoes, mountains, beaches.
“Night lovers” by Mohammad Hayati, Iran
“Riaño” by Pablo Ruiz, Spain
Humankind
Meet Mark Melton, a 43 year old tax attorney in Dallas who has become a defender of tenants, helping over 6,000 people around Texas avoid eviction as the pandemic wreaked financial havoc across the state.
Mark’s mission began in April 2020 when he noticed the rising number of people been evicted from their homes. Putting his professional skills to use, he brushed up on eviction law and offered free legal advice over Facebook. The response was overwhelming. Unable to service the volume of demands alone, Mark recruited 175 other attorneys and created the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Centre, a non-profit, pro-bono legal service to help renters understand their rights, and get access to financial assistance.
In the past 13 months, Mark and his team have taken on a wide range of issues from negotiating with landlords to court hearings and helping people source groceries. After hundreds of hearings, the team have lost only two cases. “I f you have a lawyer with you, your likelihood of getting evicted is much lower .”
Mark’s mission is a personal one. At the age of 21, he was married with two kids, when he lost his job at a large collection agency in Tulsa and the bank foreclosed on his house. Without a college degree or job prospects, Mark and his wife sold all their possessions, packed up their kids and drove their Honda Civic to Dallas to find better opportunities. After putting himself through college while working two jobs, Mark eventually graduated with a law degree. Mark credits his success to the help he got along the way and this gratitude drives him to pay it forward and help as many people as he can.
I relate to that sense of just complete and utter desperation and the necessity to rely on the charity of others just to get the most basic of things. If I shut down or break down and quit, there’s going to be more people living on the streets as a result, and I just can’t do that.
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It would be a load of fucking melons.
Fuckload I think is the scientific term.
Nice start to the day reading all that…now just got to stay away from msm til bedtime.
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A fuckload is 12 hellofalots. Unless you’re talking metric. Then of course it’s 10 deca-shittons.
I aint taking no weights and measures classes from a goddamn USAian.
Ton x10= shitton
Shitton x 10 = fuckton
There are 1.146799453 fucktons in a fuckload I believe.
shittonne & fucktonne surely?
Fuck. Yeah obv. It wouldn’t be proper English without some superfluous letters/vowels.
Small step in the right direction of people acknowledging their privilege.
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Noticed this thread for the first time, decided to start at the top, and, uh
Loving everything else though
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This is the members only edition of Future Crunch, a weekly roundup of good news, mind-blowing science, and the best bits of the internet (not necessarily in that order). One third of your subscription fee goes to charity.
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
The Keystone XL pipeline has been officially terminated, cementing one of the biggest environmental victories of all time. Activists managed to delay the $9 billion, 830,000 barrel per day, Alberta oil sands ‘dirty climate bomb’ for 12 years, and in the process, give birth to much of the modern climate movement. Take a moment to appreciate this, it’s really sweet. Even the most idealistic frontline warriors didn’t expect it to end this well.
It’s amazing how quickly industrialists seem to develop a conscience when there’s a threat to their bottom line. This time, it’s Italian automotive giant Fiat that suddenly cares about the fate of the planet, saying it will be an all electric brand by 2030. “This is our greatest project.” Indeed. Engadget
The United States has the world’s second largest fleet of coal plants, and 80% of them are now either more expensive to continue operating compared to building new wind or solar, or are set to retire in the next four years. If you think the last four years were bad for US coal, the next four are going to make them feel like a cakewalk. Meanwhile, Romania, one of Europe’s last remaining coal holdouts, says it will close all of its coal mines by 2032, introduce ecotaxes, discourage the registration of cars older than 15 years and boost scrapping schemes for polluting vehicles, and Canada says it will no longer approve thermal-coal mining projects. C’mon Straya.
Over half a million people in Senegal just gained access to clean electricity after two solar PV plants were switched on, and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a massive $100 million off-grid solar project has been approved to bring power to three northern cities that currently have no connection to the grid. In Spain, renewables produced half of the country’s electricity for the first time ever last month, reaching 50.7% of supply, and in Texas, four months after Republicans falsely blamed clean energy for the failure of the electric grid, investors have decided just what the state needs: more clean power. 15GW, the equivalent of Finland’s entire electrical capacity, is now under construction or in advanced development, more than double three years ago. Bloomberg
Own the libs
Good news you probably didn’t hear about
There’s been a new update on progress towards SDG7: the number of people without access to electricity has declined from 1.2 billion to 759 million in the past decade, the number connected to mini grids more than doubled during the same time period, and access to clean cooking solutions has grown by 1% annually.
The US government will make $1 billion in grants available to narrow the digital divide, expanding broadband access for Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian communities. Only half of households on tribal lands currently subscribe to a home internet service. The Verge
Your regular reminder that social attitudes can and do change, sometimes in the space of a single generation. Support for same-sex marriage in the United States is now at an all time high of 70%, up from 60% in 2015 when it was legalized, and from 27% in 1996, when Gallup first started asking the question. Hopefully we’re also at the beginning of a similar shift in India, with news that Tamil Nadu has become the first Indian state to ban conversion 'therapy’ after an unprecedented and progressive judgment by the Madras High Court last week.
A decades-long effort to infuse mosquitoes with a virus-blocking microbe has culminated in a trial in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, that achieved a 77% reduction in cases and an 86% reduction in people needing hospital care. Not only was the science behind this world class, it’s also one of the best examples we’ve ever seen of community engagement. They had to convince 90% of the community before releasing the mosquitoes, requiring years of meetings, letting people in to see the labs, using Whatsapp for engagement, and employing over 10,000 local volunteers to place the mosquito eggs in people’s backyards. Development specialists take note: this is how to help, not through patronage, but through partnership.
The global effort to eradicate polio just received a major boost with the release of $5 billion in new funding from The Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a public-private partnership by national governments and health groups. Most of it will be spent on vaccinations in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the last two countries in the world where outbreaks of wild polio still occur. NYT
Health workers vaccinated a child in December, in Kandahar, where the polio vaccination effort resumed after a seven-month pause. Credit: Muhammad Sadiq/EPA
CORRECTION
In The Crunch No. 137, we wrote the following: Thanks to alternative penalties for non-violent crimes, the number of people incarcerated in the United States in 2020 plummeted by 1.7 million from 2019 (AP). This was a mistake. The accompanying article reports that “the percentage of U.S. residents who are in prison has dropped by 17%” and that the number of incarcerated individuals dropped to 1.7 million from 2019 to 2020. A significant drop, to be sure, but since there were 2.3 million incarcerated people in 2019, a 1.7 million drop would virtually erase the US prison system.
Thank you so much to eagle-eyed subscriber, Mike Gillis, for spotting our mistake.
Life finds a way
A coalition of more than 40 groups, ranging from local NGOs to governments to international organizations, has mobilized $43 million for efforts to restore degraded habitats in the Galápagos Islands. The initiative aims to reintroduce 13 extinct species, and help increase the population of 54 threatened species.
Indonesia is home to 7.9 million acres of mangroves, more than any other country. In 2020, the government announced a plan to replant an additional 1.5 million acres by 2024. In the background however, an unsung army of ordinary Indonesians has been toiling for decades to restore these habitats. South Korea also has some big tree planting plans, saying it will plant three billion new trees over the next 30 years after joining the WEF’s One Trillion Trees initiative.
A revolutionary new conservation program in southern Ecuador, funded by a small fee on municipality water, has achieved spectacular success, re-wilding 1,500 ha and putting an additional 337,000 ha under conservation. It represents a simple, yet effective model that can be replicated across the world… In other good news from South America, Chile has passed new legislation, based on recommendations from environmental groups presented back in 2019, that will reduce the country’s plastic waste by more than 23,000 tons per year.
The total value of meat products sold in Germany fell by 4% in 2020 compared to 2019. By contrast, sales of plant-based alternatives skyrocketed by 39%, suggesting there has been a permanent shift in tastes, especially from younger consumers. Furry friends will also be pleased to hear that Israel has become the first country to completely ban the sale of all fur products, including imports and exports. Expect this to be the first in a long list over the next few years.
The critically endangered Polish wolf has recovered to an estimated population of 3,000, a massive leap from the mere 60 in existence in the early 1970s. It’s always the same story with these endangered species recoveries: decades of unseen, thankless work from scientists, conservationists and activists. That’s also what’s happened in Bulgaria, which now has a stable population of around 80 griffon vultures, more than 40 years after the birds were declared extinct in the Balkan nation. There are now at least 23 mating pairs, who have been breeding in the wild since 2016.
Making an artificial nest
Constructing the vulture aviary
Despite numerous challenges, they decided to… carrion. Seriously, check out the full gallery it’s awesome.
Indistinguishable from magic
The Metaverse just got another step closer, with an early access release of Unreal Engine 5, which makes the boundary between the digital and real worlds much blurrier. There’s no point in explaining this, you have to see it. Here’s the video announcement, and then check out this real time rendering of a simulated rockfall on the Nordic Coast. WTAF.
Lithium is going to be an essential element in our efforts to stop the world from burning, but its extraction comes with heavy environmental costs. Good news then, from researchers in Saudi Arabia, who have figured out a cost effective way to extract high purity lithium from seawater, which contains 5,000 times more lithium than land.
Scientists have come up with a blood test called an ExoSCOPE that tells them within 24 hours whether or not targeted cancer therapy is having an effect on tumor growth. Such a quick turnaround means that the treatment can be quickly adapted or rethought. Science Alert
Biologists from Cambridge have rewritten the genetic code of a synthetic bacterium that altered not only its DNA but also the cellular machinery that turns genes into biochemical products. This created a new organism that grows like E. coli but with additional properties. Knowledge of how to manipulate and edit DNA is well established, but until now it has not been possible to alter the 3 billion year old code through which DNA instructs cells to form the chains of amino acids that make up the working molecules of life. That is no longer the case. “This is potentially a revolution in biology.” Science Daily
Humanity has achieved a new milestone in our efforts to harness the power of the stars. Last week the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ fusion machine created a writhing loop of plasma that reached 120 million degrees Celsius, eight times the temperature of the core of the Sun, and then clung onto it for 101 seconds. Crazy.
The infrared image of the “artificial sun” successfully burning at 120 million °C for 100 seconds. Source: Institute of Plasma Physics, Hefei Institute of Material Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The information superhighway is still awesome
This is one of the simplest, yet most useful reframes we’ve ever seen. Instead of thinking about sleep as a chore, think about it as an opportunity . Atlantic columnist and general wise old dude, Arthur C Brooks, already has us sleeping better. Do yourself a favour and read this. Thank us later.
Not one, not two, but THREE incredible pieces of sports journalism for you this week. Alex Perry has an extraordinary story about one man’s quest to expose the murky underworld of international swimming (we promise you will never look at the Olympics in the same way again), then Sam Anderson almost converts us into basketball fans with a masterpiece on (possibly) the greatest basketball team of all time and finally, William Ralston offers up an unexpectedly fascinating deep dive on how the UK became the Silicon Valley of turf.
China is not a monolithic society, but instead one that is fracturing in complex and challenging ways. Beneath the facade of triumphalist nationalism lies a potent set of rifts around gender, ethnicity, urbanism and inequality that are getting very ugly. We’ve been waiting for someone to put this into words for years; props to Elizabeth Economy (talk about a name being a destiny) for nailing it. Foreign Affairs
On a related theme, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock you’re probably aware that the lab-leak theory for COVID-19 is very much back on the table. This article from Vanity Fair does the most even-handed job at explaining why. Occam’s Razor seems useful here - the simplest answer is that the origin is natural - but it also seems impossibly unlucky that one of only two coronaviruses research labs in the world sat 280 meters from the wet market where it all supposedly started.
Our belief that complex human societies arose 10,000 years ago is a truth so widely accepted we never question it. Time to think again, following the discovery of an 11,500 year old settlement in Turkey. You can read more about Göbekli Tepe itself in Archeology, and there’s also a great essay by Samo Burja in Palladium on what it all means.
We have no reason to assume complex societies can only be found after the last ice age. Rather, they may have been with us for a very long time—perhaps from our very beginning. The environment of evolutionary adaptation for Homo sapiens as we now know ourselves wasn’t the wild savannah; rather, it was complex society all along.
Göbekli Tepe vulture stone, the world’s first-known pictograph. Sue Fleckney
Humankind
Meet Lisa Carne, an American marine biologist who has helped save the world’s second largest coral reef through a radical restoration project launched ten years ago.
Growing up in California, Lisa always had an affinity for the ocean. In 1994, after graduating with a biology degree, Lisa travelled to Southern Belize and started working as a volunteer research assistant at the Smithsonian field station in Placencia, where she witnessed the impact that climate change and rising sea temperatures were having on ocean habitats.
In 2001 Hurricane Iris devasted Belize, turning the magnificent coral reef into ‘a wasteland.’ Instead of waiting for a large organization to come up with the solution, Lisa devised her own radical plan. After noticing living pieces of Elkhorn coral that had broken from the reef but were still alive, Lisa questioned if it was possible to restore the reefs by transplanting coral?
Lisa worked tirelessly for years, trying to convince people that her transplanting experiment was viable. In 2006 she finally received a research grant to create a natural laboratory and coral nursery. Local fishermen and tour guides were the first to notice the reforested reefs and offered to help with the planting. In 2013 she registered a community-based NGO called Fragments of Hope to continue the restoration work and developed a coral restoration training course, which has certified over 70 Belizeans to date and helps supplement local people’s income with restoration jobs.
In 2014 she was named an Ocean Hero by Oceana Belize and in 2017, Fragments of Hope received the Lighthouse Activity Award from the UN Secretariat for Climate Change. What started as a very personal labour of love is now considered the Caribbean’s most successful reef restoration project, and today conservationists around the world follow Lisa’s lead.
When we first started maybe one or two people were doing reef restoration. But nowadays, everybody’s doing it. I joke that it’s like yoga now.
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This is the members only edition of Future Crunch, a weekly roundup of good news, mindblowing science, and the best bits of the internet (not necessarily in that order). One third of your subscription fee goes to charity.
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
Solar is on a tear worldwide, and especially in the United States. The first three months of 2021 saw 2.5 Hoover Dams worth of capacity added to the grid, a 46% increase compared to the same period in 2020. Solar and wind accounted for 99% of all new power generation capacity in Q1. Endgame for coal and gas.
It’s the same story everywhere. IRENA now estimates that over 800 GW of global coal generation is more expensive than building new wind and solar, which is very bad news for any financial entities still exposed to the coal sector.
Case in point: since 2014, Chinese companies have financed 52 overseas coal projects, worth a combined $160 billion. It’s one of the worst investment decisions of all time. Only one plant has gone into operation, and 33 have been shelved or cancelled, with plenty more still to come. No new projects were announced at all in 2020. So much for those coal pipelines.
While we’re on coal pipelines, India might have already hit peak coal burn. Great piece in Bloomberg on how a major new investment in renewables by the country’s largest power company signals the beginning of the end for thermal energy.
Meanwhile, in Europe, another bad week in court for fossil fuels. A Brussels court has ruled that Belgium’s failure to meet climate targets is a violation of human rights, and recognized 58,000 citizens as co-plaintiffs. The historic judgement follows similar, recent rulings in the Netherlands, Germany and France. Guardian
Two pieces of good news for the hard to decarbonize parts of the economy. Engineers in Sweden have successfully produced 100 tons of sponge iron from hydrogen, a major milestone in the race to produce green steel, and in Germany, gas for heating is down nearly 15% in the past four years, while heat pumps crossed 50% market share last year.
A rare bit of good news on the home front too. In a bid to become the ‘Norway of Australia’ the state of New South Wales has unveiled a massive $490 million package of new incentives, tax cuts and spending on fast-charging infrastructure for electric vehicles. Here’s a list of the cars that benefit the most. C’mon Victoria.
A few months after Audi announced a 2025 carbon neutrality target, the German carmaker has thrown down the electric gauntlet yet again, declaring that from 2026 it will no longer launch new combustion engine models, not even hybrids. Only pure battery vehicles will be developed. That’s five years away. Der Spiegel
Why say “liquid cooled two speed transmission” when you can say Flüssigkeitsgekühlten Zweigang-Getriebe ? We’re making an executive decision. From now on, all car-related images in this newsletter will be labelled in German.
Good news you probably didn’t hear about
Bangladesh, home to 160 million people, has been heralded a ‘development miracle’ as it celebrates its 50th year of independence. Since 1991, GDP per capita has increased seven fold, 24 million people have been lifted out of poverty, life expectancy has risen to 73 years, infant and maternal mortality rates have fallen by a factor of five and the literacy rate has increase from 35% to 74%. Daily Star
A study in The Lancet of 21 low, medium and high income countries has found that there has been no increase in suicide rates and that 12 countries actually recorded a decrease. This good news has been attributed to increased awareness, better access to mental health services, financial relief packages and new connection points within local communities.
Saudi Arabia has officially allowed single, divorced or widowed women to live independently in a house without permission from father or any other male guardian. “An adult woman has the right to choose where to live. Families can no longer file lawsuits against their daughters who choose to live alone.” Gulf News
More than 1,800 schools in the Indian state of West Bengal have installed mini-solar plants in the past two years, and there are plans to expand installations by 1,000 schools a year until the number reaches 25,000. Schools have used the savings for tree-planting, additional teachers, computer classes and sanitation upkeep. Reuters
Workers with disabilities in Hawaii will be guaranteed fair wages, after an old labour law that allowed employers to pay them less was given the boot. It’s welcome news for the 26,000 people who live in Hawaii with some form of disability. Guardian
The Passamaquoddy tribe in Maine have brought back their ancestral land of Pine Island, 160 years after it was taken from them. With the help of a grant from conservation charities, the small tribe raised enough money to purchase the island back, which has been their home for over 10,000 years. The Hill
Our concept of land ownership is that nobody ‘owns’ land. Instead, we have a sacred duty to protect it. This feels like finding a lost relative - Donald Soctomah, Passamaquoddy Historic Preservation Officer
Donald Soctomah rows a birch bark canoe with his son, also named Donald. The canoe was built based on a 21-foot Passamaquoddy canoe dating from 1850.
Life, uh, finds a way
Following the shutdown of coal mining in the Svalbard region of Norway, the government has started cleanup operations and expanded the boundaries of a national park by 2,914 km2 to include the former coal sites. “Our goal is for Svalbard to be one of the best-managed wilderness areas in the world." Barents Observer
Gabon has passed new laws to protect the country’s 69 species of sharks and rays. The landmark measures include new laws to fully regulate shark and ray catches, and highlight a new global initiative launched on World Ocean Day to save these endangered marine species.
Tanzania is hopeful of reaching a ‘zero-elephant-poaching’ target after making thousands of arrests, including 21 kingpins of the illegal trafficking trade. Since 2014, the elephant population has increased by 17,000, remarkable progress for a country that once had the unenviable status of the world’s elephant killing fields.
A ‘drastic times, drastic measures’ approach has proved successful for two radical conservation experiments on different sides of the globe. In Southwest America, the population of the Mexican wolf has been bolstered by a fostering program which placed captive born pups into wild dens, while in Australia, a ‘headstarting’ method has saved the bridled nailtail wallaby from extinction by giving juveniles a few years in protected areas, before released them back into the wild.
Animal rights activists in China have pulled off an incredible rescue mission, removing 101 moon bears from a bile extraction facility and transporting them over 1,200 km to a rehab centre. It took years of planning, and involved three convoys of nine trucks each, and a dedicated team of vets and carers who will continue to rehabilitate the bears as they settle into their new home.
This unprecedented, historic and momentous event has been eight years in the making. It has been the most challenging, unpredictable and emotional journey we have been on as an organisation.
Indistinguishable from magic
Did you know Earth has a heartbeat? A new study of ancient geological events suggests regular surges of geological activity every 27 million years. "These cyclic pulses of tectonics and climate change may be the result of geophysical processes, or alternatively astronomical cycles associated with the Earth’s motions in the Solar System and the Galaxy."Science Alert
Speaking of celestial motions, we unofficially have two space stations now, after Chinese astronauts arrived at Tianhe Harmony of the Heavens , the living quarters of their new space station. Early lead for the Chinese in the space name race here. Their rocket was called Divine Vessel and the finished space station will be called Tiangong Heavenly Palace . C’mon NASA. SCMP
By studying robins, British biologists may have cracked the mystery of how birds sense the Earth’s magnetic field. A molecule in their eyes called cryptochrome 4 that is sensitive to magnetism gives them an inbuilt living compass that allows them to migrate over thousands of kilometres. BBC
Scientists in New York have made a breakthrough in explaining how olfaction works, capturing the first moment when a smell actually binds to a living molecule. “Although we’ve had access to receptors as molecules for a long time, no one’s ever actually seen with their eyes what it looks like when an odour binds to a receptor.” Quanta
One for all you circular economy and recycling nerds. A Taiwanese team has created the world’s first hospital ward built out of recycled materials. The walls are made from 90% recycled aluminum, the insulation from recycled polyester, and cupboard handles and clothes hooks from recycled medical waste. CNN
And here’s one for the Metaverse junkies. A competition between 3D artists to recreate the same walking animation has been compiled into an amazing 9 minute montage. The range is incredible: sci-fi vistas, gods and monsters, otters in Napoleonic uniforms, a dad hauling a huge teddy bear on his back for his daughter, all set to beautiful music. Verge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKBs9l8jS6Qhttps://futurecrunch.com/content/images/2021/06/WLKING.gif(image larger than 8 MB)
The information superhighway is still awesome
This brilliant, mind-expanding essay takes Gaia theory and adds a technological flavour, arguing that Earth has very recently evolved a smart exoskeleton, a distributed sensory organ capable of calculating things. The author proposes that technology isn’t unnatural, but instead an essential step on the path to planetary intelligence, an Earth that becomes, in effect, self-aware. Whoa. Neoma
Robinson Meyer has come up with a great name for something very familiar to clean energy enthusiasts, the virtuous circle by which policy scales new technology, making it cheaper, which enables more ambitious policy, which makes clean energy even cheaper. On and on it goes, the clean energy flywheel. Or, as he calls it, The Green Vortex.
What if, asks Xiaoyu He, success is the enemy of freedom ? This is an old conundrum, but one worth investigating again as we emerge blinking into the post pandemic light. Human flourishing depends on exploration and openness to new experience, and yet the most successful people are the least incentivized to explore further. Fortunately, the author has a solution.
A truly world class piece of science journalism by Rowan Jacobsen. As transformational as the genetics revolution has been, at its heart has always been a mystery: proteins. Thanks to recent breakthroughs however, the mystery is clearing up and we’re starting to see the first designer proteins emerge from labs. Welcome to ‘the Amino Age.’ SA
Kílian Jornet is the most outrageously talented mountain runner of all time, someone who once ran up and down Everest in 17 hours. Having achieved everything there is to achieve in the sport, his thoughts have now turned to climbing mountains purely for the love of it - the mountaineering equivalent of a spiritual surfer.
I want to be an 80-year-old boy. I want to experience every phase of my love for the mountains with total madness, with my eyes shining brightly, my heart beating wildly and out of control, my legs shaking from having just climbed up a mountain. Until, when I’m truly old, my body stops working for good.
‘This is the way I want to be’: training in Norway. Photograph: Kilian Journet/Reuters
Humankind
Meet Gaurav Rai AKA ‘Oxygen Man’, a 52 year old general manager in Patna, India, who turned his personal battle with COVID-19 into a live-saving mission for over 1,400 people by providing free oxygen tanks to critically ill patients.
In July 2020, Gaurav tested positive to COVID-19 and was rushed to his local hospital. Due to a shortage of beds and oxygen cylinders, he was left to wait beside the staircase of the ward, gasping for air. His wife Aruna took matters into her own hands and after five hours of searching, found an oxygen tank for her husband through a private connection. This was a turning point for Gaurav, “I realised how a small oxygen cylinder could save a life. I told my wife that I would pay it forward if I survived .”
While recovering at home, Gaurav and his wife pooled their savings to buy ten oxygen cylinders and launched an oxygen bank from their basement. Gaurav would wake every day at 5.30am, load the oxygen cylinders into his own car and deliver them to patients across the city. When cases continued to spike, the couple purchased more cylinders. However, thanks to social media, news of their small endeavour started to spread, and donations began to pour in.
Today Gaurav’s oxygen bank has over 200 cylinders and has extended across 18 districts of Bihar. Unable to personally deliver to the growing demand, Gaurav requests people collect the cylinders from his house, but he always keeps a few spares in his car for emergencies. Without a single day’s rest or any financial gain, Gaurav celebrates the recovery of each person he helps with a cake.
There’s a twist in Gaurav’s story,. In December 2019 an infection paralysed his vocal cord, and unable to speak, he felt so lost that he contemplated suicide. An unintended side effect of his COVID-19 battle seven months later was that it restored his voice and gave him a new purpose in life. “ I told my wife if God makes me survive, I will do something for mankind. I was cured in a few days, and it seemed that The Almighty indeed chose this task for me ."
Gaurav Rai loading oxygen cylinders in his car for delivery; Photo by Ranjan Rahi
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Sold in the form of form of powder, tonic or pills, bear bile is considered to be a ‘cure’ for a range of ailments from acne, hangovers, colds, sore-throats, haemorrhoids, conjunctivitis and even cancer. But it comes at a devastating price for the bears, and many never escape the torture of bear farming.
In case anyone else is curious about bear bile farms.
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Good news you probably didn’t hear about
A gentle reminder that as of Tuesday this week, over three billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered around the world. Most media outlets are focusing on how badly the rollout is going, and while those criticisms are valid in some countries (8% in four months is hard to spin, even for Scotty From Marketing), globally the numbers tell a very different story. Not that you’d know it from the headlines, but the pace is picking up: it took 20 weeks to give out the first billion doses, but only four to give out the last billion.
This is easily the biggest and fastest vaccination effort in human history. Our species has never done anything remotely like this before. The manufacturing and distribution challenges are unfathomably hard, and that’s before you get to the all-too-human problems of bureaucratic screwups, political cynicism, and a natural distrust of any new technology. Given the obstacles, it’s amazing that we’ve got this far, this quickly. Perhaps a moment of appreciation is in order?
A villager receives a dose of COVID vaccine during a door-to-door drive in West Bengal, India on Monday 21st June, one of 8.6 million doses administered on that day.
A moment of appreciation too, for a successful, multi-generational effort to eliminate malaria in China. It’s the 40th nation in the world to achieve malaria-free status, and the first in the western Pacific region in 30 years. Not bad for a country that used to report 30 million cases per year in the 1940s. Some good news from Tanzania too, which will allow pregnant girls and teen mothers the opportunity to resume secondary education, overturning a 4-year ban that prevented thousands from finishing their studies.
In Canada, a welcome win for LGBTQI+ rights with the passage of a historic bill criminalizing conversion therapy. It joins Germany, Malta, Ecuador, Brazil and Taiwan as countries that have outlawed the practice nationally. Further south, Connecticut has restored voting rights to people with past convictions, marking a milestone in the push to end criminal disenfranchisement, and in Montana, 18,000 acres of wildlife reserve, known as the National Bison Range, has been formally handed back to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes who will now manage it in perpetuity.
Bad news for fat cats, good news for everyone else, as the world’s largest economies have taken a decisive step forward to make multinational companies pay their fair share, setting an international minimum corporate tax rate of at least 15%. In Iran, a set of reforms has been passed to ensure that proper schooling is made available to all migrants, including thousands of undocumented children, and in Europe, 33 cities have signed an International Alliance of Safe Harbours Agreement allowing them to take in more refugees rescued at sea, to distribute the load more evenly away from hotspots in the Mediterranean.
Finally, while it’s not technically good news we thought we should still include the latest figures from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program on global conflict-related deaths during 2020. Although the numbers are down from their highs of the mid 2010s, and down significantly from a generation ago, there was a slight uptick in both global conflicts and battle deaths last year. A sobering reminder that progress is never a straight line.
Source: UCDP
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
Heralded as ‘a law of laws’, the EU has approved landmark legislation to enshrine greenhouse gas emissions targets into law, requiring a 55% reduction by 2030, net zero by 2050, and the creation of a carbon budget for 2030-2050 that meets climate goals. It’s a very, very big deal. You can already see the ripples: Volkswagen immediately announced it would stop making combustion engines in Europe by 2035, and Ford and Volvo said they would start all-electric production in Europe by 2030.
Canada can see the writing on the wall too, announcing a ban on the sale of new fuel-burning cars and light-duty trucks from 2035, and Maine says it will no longer invest in companies with big oil and gas portfolios, making it the first state in the United States to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Perhaps they’d gotten wind of a recent survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas of oil and gas executives, which included this little gem:
We have relationships with approximately 400 institutional investors and close relationships with 100. Approximately one is willing to give new capital to oil and gas investment.
Ouch.
Or perhaps they’ve been paying attention to the latest projections by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics which say that wind turbine service technician and solar panel installer will be the country’s fastest and third fastest growing occupations in the next decade. Reminds us of this graph, which might be one of our favourites of the entire Trump era (still waiting for that NYT visit to ‘Wind Country’).
The world’s industrialists and financiers can certainly smell the blood in the water. The Financial Times is reporting that the vast majority of new coal-power plants being planned around the world will not make back their upfront costs, including all of those under construction in China. Specifically, 92% of facilities proposed or under construction globally will now cost more to build than the future cash flow they will generate. Pipelines? More like pipe dreams.
Right on cue, China’s biggest bank has dumped a plan to finance a $3 billion coal-fired power plant in Zimbabwe, Japanese trading house Mitsui & Co has eagerly offloaded its investments into Indonesian coal, and South Korea’s three big insurance companies will stop underwriting coal-power projects, thanks in part to some serious people power.
One of Malaysia’s biggest banks RHB has announced a coal exit by 2022, in Bangladesh, regulators are scrapping plansfor 10 coal-fired power plants in favour of renewable energy (that’s another 8GW off the table), and North Macedonia and Montenegro have become the first countries in the Western Balkans to announce coal exits, saying they will close their plants by 2027 and 2035 respectively.
All that dirty energy is going to have to be replaced, which is why California just approved a massive 11.5GW of clean energy to replace gas and the state’s last nuclear power plant, and why fossil fuels billionaire and Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is making ‘a green pivot’ with a $10.1 billion investment into clean energy over the next three years. “I envision a future when our country will be transformed from a large importer of fossil energy to a large exporter of clean solar energy solutions.” Sounds good to us.
Now, if someone could just tell Scotty From Marketing.
The only home we’ve ever known
The entire landmass of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, 3,800 km2 of pristine wilderness that you’ve definitely seen in a nature documentary, will be designated as a protected area, complementing an already existing 1.24 million km2 marine reserve.
In other conservation news, a vast area of breathtaking beauty ranging through Albania, North Macedonia and Kosovo is about to become a national park, creating one of the largest protected areas in Europe, and in the United Arab Emirates, the population of the endangered Arabian oryx has increased by 22% in four years thanks to a reintroduction programinside the country’s largest nature reserve.
It’s probably worth mentioning, for the second time in this newsletter, that in the last decade, an area larger than Russia has been added to the world as parks or conservation areas. To give that success a different perspective, of all the land ever protected and conserved by official action, 42% was in the last ten years. More than 17% of the world’s landmass is now protected from development.
Anela Stavrevska-Panajotova, IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) National expert for management plan, presents the new Shar Mountain National Park on a map, during a media briefing on Shar Mountain, in the northwest of North Macedonia, Wednesday, June 9, 2021.
Meanwhile, quiet, clean, and green are not words you would typically use to describe a construction site, but on one of the busiest streets in the heart of Oslo, there’s something special going on: in a world-first, all the machinery used on site, excavators, diggers, and loaders, are now electric. In New Zealand single-use plastics will be phased out by 2025, with bans on cotton buds, packaging, cutlery, straws, and fruit labels beginning next year - measures that could remove over 2 billion single-use items from landfill each year.
Along with those carrots, there’s also a new stick, with ‘ecocide’ on its way to becoming the fifth crime at the International Criminal Court. Big polluters and many political leaders will be sleeping a little more uneasily after a six month deliberation by a team of international lawyers unveiled the new definition which ranks ‘attacks on nature’ on par with war crimes.
Ecocide
Unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.
Indistinguishable from magic
Here’s something you don’t see every day - a dual-mode flying car. This one just completed the first ever inter-city trip between two airports in Slovakia. After landing, the plane transforms in under three minutes into a sports car ( I think I might have drawn this exact thing when I was six - Gus ).
It’s an almost universal feeling: the thrill of hearing a mysterious new bird song, usually followed by a question: What was that bird? The question just got much easier to answer, with the release of a new AI-powered app that can identify 400 species from North America. Merlin
Using a not-dissimilar kind of technology, a simple blood test that can detect more than 50 types of cancer has been shown to be accurate enough to be used as a screening tool for over 50s. Britain’s NHS will begin a pilot scheme of the test with 140,000 people this year. If it achieves the same kind of results, then this test will be used for millions of patients by 2025.
A startup co-founded by Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna has successfully used CRISPR to treat patients for transthyretin amyloidosis, a devastating disease in which a build-up of a protein affects a patient’s heart and nervous system. It’s the first time ever that the gene-editing technology has been injected straight into the patient’s bloodstream and successfully found its way to the problem, opening the door for a much wider range of treatments. NPR
In Israel, the world’s first industrial cultured meat facility has opened, capable of producing 500 kilograms of slaughter-free meat per day. It’s a big step forward on the road to making scalable cell-based meat production a reality. New Atlas
A Swiss company has unveiled a revolutionary machine capable of growing new skin for burn patients. Using a small sample of healthy skin, cells are grown in a laboratory and then combined with a hydrogel to produce large quantities of new skin. The result, denovoSkin, is one millimetre thick, the same as the average natural dermis and epidermis. A sample the size of a stamp can end up as a piece almost the size of a place mat. “It’s not artificial skin, but it’s not exactly natural skin either.”
Medicine Sans Frontiers have turned to additive manufacturing at their Gaza offices, to print face masks designed to speed up healing and reduce scarring. The masks are part of a larger program which provides 3D printed masks and prosthetics to burn patients, and so far has treated more than 100 people from Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Jordan and Haiti. AFP
The information superhighway is still awesome
This is the best written, most detailed, and most compelling account we’ve come across of what ketamine treatment for PTSD feels like, by the executive editor of Popular Science, Rachel Feltman. “I experience a mental quiet I have never known before. I’m able to have one single thought at a time. I luxuriate over each notion like it’s a piece of chocolate melting in my mouth. I am achingly kind to myself in these moments, and I ache to be so kind to myself at all times.”
Ezra Klein sat down with a technologist, a policymaker, a professor and a novelist to talk about climate change and democracy, and the result is an unusually lucid and nuanced conversation about where things might be headed. Come for the KSR, stay for some very careful tiptoeing around geoengineering. NYT
Business journalism and comics aren’t exactly natural bedfellows, but that’s what makes this ‘article’ all the more fun. It’s the story of how Turkish thieves stole $40 million of copper by spray-painting rocks, which already gives you a pretty compelling headline, and that’s before you get to the illustrations. To The Internet - more of this kind of thing please.
Or this, a crushing meditation on identity and desire by a lonely mother, and even this, an all too familiar memory, years later, of what searing teenage embarrassment feels like.
Kevin Maguire is doing such a good job over at the New Fatherhood, it feels like he’s really plugging a big hole in online conversations around parenting. In this post he explores the search for purpose that confronts so many new dads, and ends up stuck “in between two mountains” but perhaps, finally with a pathway out.
Breathtaking, in so many senses of the word. One of the world’s best freedivers, Toulouse Néry, and his wife, Julie Gautier, created this masterpiece in 2019. We guarantee it’s one of the most amazing things you will ever watch, an underwater journey “in the space between two breaths.” Stick with it for the sound of cracking ice sheets, and the sleeping sperm whales. Humans are amazing .
Humankind
Meet Nancy Hernandez, a 60 year old survivor of human trafficking in Tampa, who has transformed her trauma into a mission to help survivors of abuse create a better life for themselves and their families.
Born in Puerto Rico to a poor and dysfunctional family, Nancy was 18 when she visited New York and met an older man who promised her the American Dream. Her dream spiralled into a nightmare when Nancy’s new husband pimped her out to drug dealers and forced her to traffic drugs inside her body around the world. For 27 years Nancy endured daily abuse without any hope of release.
Her escape came by chance when her husband was killed in a car accident on New Year’s Eve in 2006. Nancy was 45 years old and finally in control of her life, “it was a new beginning, at a time when I thought I couldn’t change anything.” But she was dealt another blow, a cancer diagnosis attributed to the harsh chemicals her body had endured. Not one to throw away her second chance, Nancy survived her cancer battle, found God and returned to the streets of Tampa with a single purpose - to give other survivors the help that she spent years searching for.
Nancy’s mission started small, collecting donations to buy food. Every day she walked down Nebraska Avenue, handing out sandwiches and water to survivors of abuse and listening to their stories. Driven by faith and grit, Nancy created a network of support and helped women find homes, food and health assistance. In 2014 Nancy formalized her charitable acts into a non-profit Mujeres Restauradas por Dios , ‘Women Restored by God’.
The organisation opened its first brick-and-mortar location last month, on Nebraska Avenue, not far from where Nancy started handing out sandwiches 14 years ago. Her network includes 43 organizations that help survivors navigate everything from insurance and mental health to financial assistance. Mujeres Restauradas por Dios also played a key role in finding services for people evacuated from Puerto Rico after the devastation of hurricanes Irma and Maria, and hasprovided 1.5 million pounds of food to over 7,000 families during the pandemic. There’s always food and a toiletries pantry on site.
Today she’s heralded as a local hero in Tampa, but she’s never forgotten what it feels like to be powerless. Her message to survivors is clear and powered by hope and solidarity - “You can get out of there. You are not alone. This woman is here for you. This woman is here to help you.”
Food donations are unloaded at the new offices of Mujeres Restauradas por Dios by Nancy Hernandez, left, and volunteers Dulce Reyes and Yesenia Guerra.
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@seities Don’t know if you have seen it/are interested but young suzzer is about to run a walrus
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Good news you probably didn’t hear about
India has made amazing progress in reducing visceral leishmaniasis , commonly known as kala-azar. You’ve probably heard of it in western media as the “flesh-eating disease” (it’s like crack for newspaper editors). According to a new report from the WHO, the number of cases has decreased by 97% since 1992. Last year, there were only 2,048 cases, and 37 deaths.
Cancer death rates continue to decline in the United States for all racial and ethnic groups. For men, the death rate dropped by an average of 2.3% a year between 2015 and 2018; for women, an average of 2.1% during the same time period. STAT
With more people living longer lives, the overall number of Alzheimer’s cases in rich countries has risen. What you might not know however, is that the actual percentage of people with the disease is falling - there has been a 16% decrease in Alzheimer’s incidence in the OECD decade-on-decade since 1988. El Pais
Last month marked the ten year anniversary of a groundbreaking treaty establishing global labour standards to protect the rights of domestic workers. Over the last decade, 32 countries have signed up, comprehensive laws have been passed in several of them, and there have been improvements in many others, including minimum wages, rest days, paid holidays, written contracts, access to labour courts, and collective bargaining agreements. The International Domestic Worker Federation, founded in 2013, now has half a million members worldwide. HRW
Domestic worker and human rights organizations join forces to demonstrate at the opening of policy negotiations at the International Labour Conference in Geneva, Switzerland, June 2010. Credit: Jennifer Natalie Fish
California, home to 40 million people, has just passed a budget with a massive increase in education spending, including universal kindergarten for 4 year olds and the United States’ first free breakfast and lunch program for all students. Edsource
Work has begun in Chile on the world’s first constitution to be drafted by an equal number of women and men. The historic moment is a direct result of the 2019 protests that challenged inequality in one of Latin America’s most socially conservative countries. NBC
Urban planners across Europe are redesigning transport systems to be more accessible to all genders. For over a century, the male commute to work by car has been favoured, with wide roads that left little room for footpaths commonly used more by women. Change is now afoot in Paris, Barcelona and Vienna, where new policies are favouring pedestrians and cyclists. Bloomberg
Barcelona is converting one in three of its streets into small parks. 21 new plazas like the one below will be made at road junctions. Safe outdoor space within 200 metres of all homes that cater to pedestrians, offering shaded spaces in summer and facilitating spontaneous children’s play.
A city made for humans, not cars.
A nationwide movement to ban ‘tampon taxes’ across the United States is gaining momentum. Maine, Louisiana and Vermont just passed laws exempting menstrual products from sales taxes, and lawmakers in 20 other states have introduced similar legislation in the last 12 months. 19thnews
File under “most unsurprising news ever.” The world’s largest and longest trial of a four day work week resulted in a massive increase in well-being for its participants. Around 1% of Iceland’s working population took part, cutting their week to 36 hours with no reduction in pay, and no reduction in productivity either. Independent
File under “the news doesn’t tell you what’s happening in the world, it tells you what’s rare.” The proportion of Americans who consider themselves to be thriving reached 59.2% last month, the highest since Gallup started asking the question 13 years ago. The pollsters think it’s down to three things: an incredibly successful vaccination rollout, improving economic conditions, and perhaps most importantly, the psychological benefit of renewed social interaction.
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
After reducing coal to less than 2% of its energy mix in 2020, the UK is bringing its end of coal target forward by a year, to 2024. That means that in just over 40 months, the country that gave us coal-fired electricity in the first place will become the first major industrialized economy to switch coal off. For good. Reuters
Spain won’t be far behind. It’s just joined an alliance of 23 countries committed to closing all their coal plants by 2030. The country is already on the leading edge, with 85% of coal capacity due to close by the end of 2022. Euractiv
Americans consumed fewer fossil fuels last year than they have in three decades. Consumption of petroleum, natural gas, and coal dropped by 9% compared to 2019, the biggest annual decrease since the EIA started keeping track in 1949. As a result, greenhouse gas emissions fell to a 40 year low.
The average utilization rate of India’s coal-fired fleet has collapsed to 53% in the last financial year. Why does this matter? Because most of India’s coal plants were financed on the assumption they would be running 85-90% of the time. At current rates, it costs less to build new wind and solar than to keep those coal plants running. Money talks. IIEFA
Seriously. Money talks. We’re halfway through 2021, and more green bonds have been issued worldwide than in all of 2020 (which was already a record year). Sustainability is suddenly very, very sexy. Every major activity is above last year’s trend lines: Corporations are making more pledges to procure clean energy, financial markets are issuing more sustainable debt, and investors are putting more money into ESG themed exchange-traded funds.
On that note, we thought it was worth reproducing in full this tweet, by Australian energy journalist, Ketan Joshi:
The only home we’ve ever known
Local volunteers and students in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populated state, have done it again, planting 250 million saplings in a single day as part of a mission to increase forest cover to 15% within the next five years. DW
The EU’s ‘great packaging purge’ has officially commenced. As of the 3rd July, plastic cotton buds, cutlery, plates, straws, stirrers, balloon sticks and polystyrene drink and food containers are no longer available for sale across the continent. DW
Lawmakers in Tierra del Fuego have chosen environment over industry, banning salmon farming in the waters of the South American archipelago. Chile exports US$4.4 billion of salmon each year but the impact on local ecosystems, including the macroalgae forests had become a growing concern. Mercopress
California’s new state budget has allocated millions of dollars to phase out swordfish nets. The measures will prevent the deaths of hundreds of whales and sea turtles and hundreds of dolphins, seals and sea lions over the next decade. SF Chronicle
New research has shown that falling air pollution in the United States between 1999 and 2019 accounted for an almost 20% increase in agricultural yields in the nine states – Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin – that produce about two-thirds of US maize and soybeans.
Another pipeline bites the dust. The proposed Byhalia Connection, a crude oil pipeline in Memphis, has been abandoned, following a vocal campaign by local activists and celebrities that highlighted the potential threats to the drinking water of mostly black neighbourhoods. USA Today
The Wild Ingleborough project is now underway in the UK, aiming to transform 1,200 hectares of heavily grazed pastures in the Yorkshire Dales into new native woodland. 300 hectares have already being restored, with rowan, hawthorn and hazel trees planted, and hundreds of metres of drystone wall rebuilt. Country Life
Through this project, we want to show that a wilder world is a more stable one, with nature more resilient and able to adapt to change. Together with our partners and the local community, we hope to create a rich, diverse landscape for people and wildlife to thrive - Tanya Steele, Chief Executive, WWF
Where limestone pavement has been allowed to regenerate, plant life grows and the landscape in the Wild Ingleborough project site moves towards a wilder, more natural state. Credit: Andrew Parkinson / WWF-UK
Indistinguishable from magic
The first fully flushable, biodegradable pregnancy test is now available for sale in the US. The country uses 20 million tests every year, which have been accumulating in landfills for decades. These new tests, developed over six years by a women-led team, are the first major update to pregnancy testing since the 1980s. Byrdie
Paramedics in the UK have a new teammate - a robot that does the CPR for them. The robot, unlike a human, doesn’t get tired or change its delivery, meaning it can deliver high-quality CPR for as long as required, freeing up its human counterparts to focus on the clinical care. Independent
Researchers at the University of St Andrews have shown that elite freedivers have brain oxygen levels and heart rates equivalent to seals, whales, and dolphins. “We measured heart rates as low as 11 beats per minute and blood oxygenation levels, which are normally 98%, drop to 25%, far beyond the point at which we expect people to lose consciousness.” Arf!
Biologists in Chicago have developed a method, powered by machine learning, that allows them to watch how the human body converts glucose to energy at both the cellular and sub-cellular levels. This is the first time this kind of imaging has been possible, and could lead to an array of new treatments for multiple diseases. Sci Tech Daily
This one takes a little while to get your head around, but we promise it’s worth it. Someone just simulated the amount of time it would take for a space-faring civilization to colonize the Milky Way and the results are confounding. It sounds like sci-fi, but the assumptions are pretty conservative: spacecraft that travel at 30km per second, comparable to our own, an interstellar range of 10 light years, and 100,000 year gaps in between the establishment of new colonies. Even then, it only takes a billion years to colonize the galaxy (and things speed up really fast when you get to the centre). So… where are they ? And no, grainy videos from an F16 dashcam don’t count. Spice up your next Fermi’s Paradox conversation and read this, honestly, it’s great. Universe Today
https://youtu.be/hNMgtRf0GOghttps://futurecrunch.com/content/images/2021/07/Space-Civilization.gif(image larger than 8 MB)
Animation showing a hypothetical settlement of the galaxy. White points are unsettled stars, pink spheres are settled stars, white cubes represent a settlement ship in transit. Once the Galaxy’s center is reached, the rate of colonization increases dramatically. Youtube
The information superhighway is still out there, buried beneath the noise
Two excellent essays on culture and politics in China, through two very unexpected lenses. The first is from Rolling Stone, and looks at what happens when rock n’ roll comes into contact with an authoritarian state intent on stamping out any hint of rebellion, the second has the irresistible title of Ketamine and the Return of the Party-State, and is one of the best pieces of political analysis you’ll read this year.
“At the beginning of the pandemic my homesickness was a pebble, a small stone I carried with me throughout the day. Now, fifteen months later with no end in sight, as Australia’s borders tighten and its fear of others makes the world even smaller, my sadness grows.” Sisonke Msimang on homesickness, grief and global injustice. Heavy, beautiful. Guernica
So meta. 23 newsletter writers… on their favourite newsletter writers. The Cut
Marc Andreessen interviewed by a mild-mannered, centre-left economist, and an ultranationalist, alt-right fascist troll, respectively. If nothing else, you’ll find a window here into a worldview held by many in the tech industry. You decide.
Former Olympian and British diplomat, Cath Bishop, on redefining what winning looks like in the 21st century. Instead of simply checking if we’ve completed a number of tasks or achieved a set of short-term outcomes, we’re better off asking 'how have we made progress towards our longer-term purpose?" Taking Time
Razib Khan is one of our favourite Substack writers, and our go to for anything on ancient human genetics. He’s got the lowdown on what the discovery of ‘Dragon Man’ means for the human family tree, including a reminder that most of humanity is descended from a group of about 10,000 people that left Africa roughly 60,000 years ago. Altogether now! " Race is a meaningless concept ." *
This is not what genetic diversity looks like: human faces from Santa Fe, New Mexico / Stockholm, Sweden / Shanghai, China / Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia / Uluru, Australia and North Sentinel Island. All of these people are more genetically similar than any two Africans.
Humankind
We’ve never profiled a celebrity in this section before (the whole point is to introduce you to people that don’t usually make it into the news). On the eve of the Euro2020 finals though, we’re making an exception for Marcus Rashford.
The 23 year-old British footballer is famous as a forward for Manchester United and England, but last year he traded soccer goals for humanitarian ones. It all started with a tweet. On 19th March 2020, a day after the UK announced it would cancel meal vouchers over the summer holiday, Marcus jumped onto Twitter arguing that it was the government’s responsibility to support the children who relied on free school meals to eat. A groundswell of support followed and suddenly the footballer, who rarely expressed opinions, found himself front and centre of a furious public policy debate.
Marcus understood the value of a £15-a-week school meal voucher. He was raised by a single mum, who worked multiple jobs, and often scarified her own food to make sure Marcus and his 4 siblings were fed. Posting an open letter to his local MP, he urged his 4.4 million followers to do the same and explained “ the system was not built for families like mine to succeed, regardless of how hard my mum worked. As a family, we relied on breakfast clubs, free school meals, and the kindness of neighbours and coaches.”
The next day the government announced a Covid summer food fund, giving 1.3 million kids meal vouchers over the holidays. Marcus joined forces with the charity FareShare to help fill the gap for the rest. By October, he was on a mission again, petitioning for an extension of out-of-term free school meals until Easter 2021. When the government refused to budge Marcus appealed to businesses to offer free meals and food to people in need. The response was astonishing, from small cafes to supermarket chains, Marcus retweeted pledge after pledge forcing the government into a second U-turn, extending the school food programme into the Easter, summer and Christmas breaks in 2021.
Through his work with FareShare, Marcus has helped raise enough money to distribute over 21 million meals to children and families who might not otherwise have eaten. In October 2020 he became the youngest person to top The Sunday Times Giving List and has vowed to “fight for the rest of my life” to end child hunger in the UK.
Rashford takes the knee before a Euro2020 warm-up match against Romania
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