Welcome back, Shit Givers.

It's been a brutal week for so many of us. I hope you were able to hug someone you love. Let's get to it.

TLDR:

• Lithium is expensive AF because it's in wildly short supply

• Paxlovid and Long COVID, a thing?

• Global breadbaskets are getting hotter and/or wetter and/or laced with explosives

• Fuck guns

• Healthcare info privacy is not a thing, apparently

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

What's holding back EV's

The news: After years of scaling solar and wind, the pieces are coming together for a vastly cleaner economy -- and just in time.

The archaic US electric grid may have a very, very rough summer, but Exxon is going to court, for real this time. The Biden administration approved a new transmission line that could reshape power in the West, but California will rely on gas and diesel to prevent blackouts. We can predict wind better now, and robots could build turbines faster, but the race to bigger means the industry simply isn't profitable. Meanwhile, desertification grows in the West.

Understand it: No one said this shit was gonna be easy. Two glaring obstacles remain.

The first issue: Raw materials. While battery prices have been dropping for a decade, they've finally flat-lined, and are now climbing again. Here's why:

Lithium -- the heart of almost every battery we use in 2022, and for at least the next ten years -- is in incredibly short supply, and prices are up almost 500% over the last year.

Which means batteries are more expensive, which means EV's could be even more expensive than they already are. 50% of the world's supply of lithium is processed from South American underground lakes, while Australia mines much of the rest out of rocks.

Various other deposits have been explored around the world, but local opposition has understandably put the kibosh on most new mining plans -- because existing lithium mining techniques trash local ecosystems, require a shit ton of energy and water, and emit their own share of CO2.

Look, this whole thing is complicated and not ideal timing for keeping things cool, and right when we're on the cusp of a transportation revolution:

• The compound average growth rate of electrified transport is 48%, blowing away storage and energy production

• At least 12 states have banned gas cars after 2035

• Customer interest in EV's is higher than it's ever been (half of new buyers worldwide want an EV, though just 29% in the US), and that's probably due to both nightmare gasoline prices, and a flood of new EV models

• War in Europe has crushed availability of other battery ingredients, driving up costs and restricting availability of those clean new autos

• Tesla is actually piloting a program to let other cars use their fancy Superchargers

• Bank of America is offering some employees $4k to buy an EV

• EV's of every kind are already displacing 1.5 million barrels of oil a day (much of it from electric mopeds, scooters, and motorcycles in Asia)

We. Need. More. Batteries. Pronto.

One potential, partial solve to the lithium issue? Battery recycling. But we don't reallllllly know how to do that efficiently yet.

The second issue: Federal support.

I don't have to rehash how Senators Manchin and Sinema have sold out the planet and effectively vetoed any climate legislation. So how do we get around them?

VC money's pouring into climate tech startups of every flavor, but clearly, the industry is playing with one hand behind its back. So 39 climate venture funds wrote to Democratic leadership, pleading for legislation to unlock clean energy regulations and more.

Among others, the administration is trying to build a domestic battery manufacturing industry, simplify and expedite permitting for large scale projects, and they recently built Solar APP+ to help communities (like yours) speed up residential solar installs.

⚡️What You Can Do: EarthJustice is suing the shit out of the US Postal Service for buying a few hundred thousand gas vehicles instead of going electric. Support their work here.

COVID

Long COVID, coming to an infection near you

The news: Earlier this week I published the third in what is apparently an on-going series of long-form "What's happening with the virus and where I think we're going" updates.

They are, at best, snapshots in time, a record of where we've been and -- pulling together from our interconnected institutions and humanity -- an idea of where we are, and most importantly, why we're here.

Huge, huge thanks to everyone for your feedback this week and for sharing the piece with loved ones, at your companies, and with policy makers.

If you haven't read it, I recommend you do, right here. If you want to listen to it, I should have that up tonight (sorry for the delay, it's been...a week).

TLDR: While we're still fairly well-protected against death and severe disease, that protection is beginning to wane a bit and will continue to do so as new subvariants become more immune evasive, as the antibodies from your original shots from months ago become less potent, and because only a third of eligible Americans have gotten a booster. Thus, COVID is everywhere right now, and institutionally, and as a society, we're doing very little to prevent it from getting worse again and to understand the vast implications of non-death outcomes, like Long COVID.

Here's a few direct and relevant updates since I published:

• More than 1 in 5 COVID survivors may develop Long COVID symptoms

• And vaccines may not prevent those Long COVID symptoms

• Pfizer will sell "nearly two dozen patent-protected medicines and vaccines...at not-for-profit prices to 45 poor countries"

  • But Ellen ‘t Hoen, a global health law fellow featured in my piece, said of the new move, "The price of new essential medicines is a huge issue and we need a sustainable approach, not just Davos-driven charitable acts."

⚡️What You Can Do: Read it and maybe wear a mask while you do (if you're around other people).

FOOD & WATER

Breadbaskets in trouble

The news: The odds of a cascading food crisis are growing with war in Europe and breadbaskets getting hotter quicker than anticipated.

Understand it: From Ukraine and Russia to the Sahel in Africa to the Canadian prairies, from the Texas panhandle to South America and India, war, massive drought, and heavy rains are alternately threatening domestic grain supplies and exports, maize, sunflower and soybean oils, barely and oats, among others.

This isn't regular inflation we're talking about. We haven't fully grasped the extent of potential global suffering. The Economist said this week, "The high cost of staple foods has already raised the number of people who cannot be sure of getting enough to eat by 440m, to 1.6bn."

What's wildly frustrating here is that hunger fell for years as yields exploded. We've appropriated the bulk of available land for food production, but make only a few varieties of our most essential crops. There's more than enough global food production to go around, but distribution is hella complicated and food waste among rich nations is wildly out of hand.

The human food system is among the most complex on earth and stressors on both the nodes and links -- from shipping to fertilizers to soil -- have been growing for years as the major players have coalesced.

For example, just "four players control 90% of the global grain trade", a ridiculously vulnerable setup as it is, but all of that has to go through a bunch of ports controlled by autocrats to be processed into diets that are killing us.

I'm not trying to be negative here, I'm simply trying to illustrate the pitfalls of ignoring warning signs from highly complex systems we all depend on, like, say, public health, or water, or food.

Here's the good news: WTF man, the good news? Yes, the good news.

Ready?

When emissions stop, new warming stops. Again, I repeat: We know fairly conclusively that when greenhouse gas emissions stop, new warming stops shortly after.

This should be an ENORMOUS carrot to decarbonize as fast as possible, especially with regard to tipping the food scales. There are impacts we can't put back in the box for a long time (ocean acidification, sea level rise), but air temps isn't one of them.

⚡️What You Can Do: Enjoy this list of climate progress we've made in 2022 alone, because you need it, and then watch We Feed People, the new documentary about José Andrés and World Central Kitchen, premiering today on Disney+.

Have a win you want to share with your fellow INI readers? Reply and we'll share it!

HEALTH & BIO

Fuck guns

I'm going to be honest here: I don't have much for you.

Since 2020, guns are the leading cause of death for American children, and now, in large part because there are almost 400 million guns in American hands, 19 more babies have been murdered, and their teachers too.

I'm exhausted, full of rage and sorrow. I don't have the energy to throw stats at you, it doesn't fucking matter, you get it. There's no science to be argued, no deeper questions to ask, I don't care. I just want them all gone. What the fuck are we doing to these children.

⚡️What You Can Do: You can donate to Uvalde families here, Everytown here, and listen to our (2021) incredibly moving conversation with Fred Guttenberg here.

BEEP BOOP

Your EHR, for sale?

The news: Your health care apps and records are less private than you think.

One of the biggest questions surrounding electronic health records for, I don't know, almost two decades, has been how to make them standardized, and available across your doctors, but also secure and private.

Narrator: They're not. From a STAT news investigation:

Understand it: I've written extensively on the horror show that is location data commerce, and I wrote a couple weeks ago about how period tracking apps may become a surveillance liability for women.

This week, Zeynep Tufekci took it further:

You may say, "but that data was aggregated", and I would remind you that researchers can pinpoint your identity from these data by harvesting and then triangulating location, apps, purchases, and more.

Your location data is barely protected, your insurance data isn't protected, your prescription data isn't protected, your search history isn't protected, your school tests aren't private, the info you give your apps, from CVS to Instacart, isn't protected, and all of it, now, can be used against you. Google and Facebook and Amazon are so integrated with the web, they often power it through cloud services and more.

These data and services, combined to make for a more useful "digital assistant", don't just predict what groceries we need to buy again or when it's time to leave for a doctor's appointment, or for your kid's school, but control us, are accessible to law enforcement, and sold every second of every day.

Tech groups need you to continue blindly giving your information away, and they're working overtime to water down any hope for privacy regulations. We can Do Better Better.

⚡️What You Can Do: We desperately need people in office who understand how the digital world works. Donate to, volunteer with, or even run for office with our friends at Run for Something, who work exclusively with under-40 progressive candidates at the local and state levels.

10 things from my notebook

• Monkeypox updates (we'll cover more next week)

  • We have a vaccine ready, it's the smallpox vaccine, you're welcome

  • Our friends at Global.health built a monkeypox map

  • Vox on why it's containable -- we think

• A new heat pump bill could speed up US home electrification by 20 years

• How companies get punished for taking climate action (must read)

• Stranded fossil fuel assets are going to be a THING

• BNEF's 2022 climate innovators, by category

• How FEMA helps wealthy white people escape sea level rise and more

• How Big Meat is just like Big Oil

• 150 burgeoning ethical AI startups, listed

• Are robot companions a key to helping avoid loneliness in the elderly?

• What might an FDA "Healthy" food label look like?

Thanks for reading, and thanks for giving a shit. Take care and have a safe holiday weekend.

-- Quinn