Welcome to the week!
I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times at this point, but it’s March already, somehow? Time keeps on slipping and the news keeps on news-ing.
Let’s get to it.
This week:
🔋 Battery supply chains
🤳Smartphone-free kids
🥜New food allergy treatment
📈Nvidia stock blasting off
And more
Have a great week,
— Willow
This is science for people who give a shit.
Every week, we help 28,000+ humans understand and unfuck the rapidly changing world around us. It feels great, and we’d love for you to join us.
New Shit Giver Nicole wants to help solve “climate - clean air and clean water.“
The essentials! Keep an eye on our Action Steps (and many of our podcast conversations!), these topics are our bread and butter.
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⚡️ Climate change:
The Solar For All grant program aims to close the solar equity gap and make solar available to 700,000 low-income US households
One way to secure rare-earth minerals that the DOE is looking at? Recycling magnets used in wind turbines. We love a circular economy
🌍 Climate change will hit the developing world particularly hard, possibly cutting GDP in Africa by 7% due to decreased crop revenues
🌏 A possible solution for energy storage of solar and wind power? Converting Brownfields (mining sites) into pumped hydro sites
🦠 Health & Bio:
🌎 Over 4000 parents in the UK are joining together to advocate for a smartphone-free childhood
🌏 Above-average temperatures in Peru are causing a surge in dengue cases, causing the government to declare a health emergency
A new study indicates that Long Covid may cause cognitive decline (if you are high risk, the CDC is recommending a spring booster)
🌎 Maybe we learned something from Covid, as countries around the world are boosting their wastewater surveillance programs to track infectious disease outbreaks of all kinds
💦 Food & Water:
A drug historically used to treat asthma and hives has been approved to treat severe food allergies (which are on the rise, for some reason), having been found to cut the risk of life-threatening allergic reactions
Check out these charts for a visual of just how big factory farming is, and how they just keep getting bigger
🌎 Scientists are using AI to find genetic traits in kelp that can make kelp forests more resilient to a warming ocean
Remember the applesauce that was tainted with lead last year? The receipts are in on how the hell contaminated food for kids ended up in stores
👩💻 Beep Boop:
🌎 Migrants in the UK are being tagged with experimental surveillance tools. Cool cool cool
Meanwhile, a new startup is building low-altitude satellites that can image people. A privacy concern, for sure, but also potentially a life-saver in a disaster
🌍 European media companies are suing Google for losses incurred due to Google’s digital advertising practices
🌍 Finally, you may have heard that the stock of the chip company, Nvidia, has been going gangbusters. Here’s a conversation with the company’s CEO on where he sees the future of AI going
*🌎 = Global news story
Last week’s most popular Action Step was finding a volunteer opportunity with Doctors Without Borders.
🌍 Donate to charity: water to support sustainable, community-owned water projects around the world.
Volunteer with your local Sierra Club chapter to fight for clean air in your community.
🌎 Get educated about becoming a climate justice activist by taking a course from Fossil Free University.
Be heard about permanently and sustainably protecting SNAP benefits.
🌍 Invest in scaling climate solutions with Carbon Equity.
*🌎 = Global Action Step
The climate clock is ticking faster and faster.
How can we use capitalism to undo the bad stuff that capitalism did and maybe even make things better?
That's today's big (loaded) question, and my returning guest is Akshat Rathi.
Akshat is a London-based senior reporter, newsletter writer, and podcaster for Bloomberg News. He is here today to talk about his first book, Climate Capitalism.
This wonderful book tells the stories of people building solutions at scale to tackle one of humanity's greatest challenges. Some solutions we've already built, like solar and batteries, and some we're still working on because they take a lot of work, and money, and politics.
In a world where journalism is going bye-bye, and the climate clock is ticking, but we've made so much progress, and we can make so much more, Akshat's reporting in this book couldn't be more timely, as we seek to answer the question, where are we on this timeline?
📖 Prefer to read? Get the transcript here.
Biofuels. Are they a real climate solution or is it just greenwashing?
When I hear terms like “carbon neutral” or “offset” or “net-zero” (as opposed to real zero), I’m giving an immediate side-eye, and these are terms that often go hand in hand with biofuels.
Sure, they’re technically renewable.
But does that mean they’re clean, or the best use of our limited time and resources? Read our biofuels explainer for the low-down
The smallest vertebrate of them all.
🙋♀️ Vote!
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