165: Molecular Dissasembly Line

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.

Good news you probably didn't hear about

The US Centre for Disease Control and Detection has released new data showing that cancer, the country's second leading cause of mortality, has seen historic drops in death rates in the last two decades. Between 2001 to 2020, cancer death rates fell by 27%, from 196.5 deaths per 100,000 people, to to 144.1 per 100,000. "The goal is now to turn cancer into a chronic disease rather than a fatal one."

Schools across Europe are making room for the 1.5 million Ukrainian children who have fled the war, with countries expanding classes, fast-tracking the registration of Ukrainian teachers, translating curriculums, and offering online lessons. Meanwhile, gamers are raising as much money as entire countries. Fortnite raised $144 million in just two weeks, League of Legends, $5.4 million and Humble Bundle $20 million.

America is edging closer to decriminalising marijuana. The House just passed legislation to clear records of people with non-violent cannabis offenses, prevent federal agencies from denying workers security clearances and to allow medical use of the drug for veterans living with PTSD. The bill is unlikely to pass the Senate - but it's a sign of just how far things have come in the last few years. CNN

Following Iceland’s success, 60 organisations in the United Kingdom have signed up for the world’s biggest four-day week trial. Starting in June, the trial will measure the impact of reduced hours on productivity, environment, and gender equality. 3,000 workers will take part, working one day less for their usual pay. Euro News

Over 460 acres of ancestral land has been returned to the Rappahannock Tribe at Fornes Cliffs in Virginia. The land is also home to one of the largest nesting populations of bald eagles on the Atlantic coast and the tribe plan to create a replica 16th-century village to educate visitors about their history, and train tribal youth in traditional river knowledge. Smithsonian

“Your ancestors cherished these lands for many generations and despite centuries of land disputes and shifting policies, your connections to these cliffs and to this river remain unbroken.”
Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, United States

Australia is expanding its Indigenous Rangers Program, which will see a substantial increase in First Nations people involved in various 'caring for Country' activities, from protecting marine turtles to monitoring illegal fishing and conducting low-intensity burns. Over the next six years, $636.4 million will fund over 1,000 new rangers and 88 new ranger groups across the country. SMH

Remember how someone once proposed building a wall to divide Texas and Mexico? Well thanks to a grassroots collaboration between the border towns of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, a binational river park will be created instead. The joint restoration project will span approximately 10 km and focus on the conservation of the Rio Grande River. Dezeen

Lynching is now a federal hate crime in America. Under the ‘Emmett Till Antilynching Act’, named after a 14-year-old boy who was abducted and killed in 1955, perpetrators face up to 30 years in prison. The landmark legislation is 122 years in the making and marks an important step forward in addressing the issues that continue to plague people of colour. NPR

"Racial hate isn't an old problem. It's a persistent problem. The law is not just about the past. It's about the present and our future, as well."
Joe Biden, President of the United States

Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it

The IPCC just released the third part of its 6th Assessment, and it's the same story as every report before it. A litany of broken climate promises. A file of shame cataloguing empty pledges. That's how the Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, described it. “We are on a fast track to climate disaster; major cities under water, unprecedented heat waves, terrifying storms, widespread water shortages, the extinction of a million species of plants and animals.” Despite all the warnings, all the protests and all the code reds, emissions just keep going up. The future looks grim. Climate scientists have never been more alarmed, activists and young people have never felt more despair.

And yet in a strange twist, energy nerds have never been more hopeful. Days before the IPCC report came out, British think tank Ember revealed that for the first time in history, clean energy produced more of the world’s electricity than coal in 2021. Wind and solar combined now make up more than 10% of global generation, and almost all of that has been achieved during a time when those technologies have been more expensive than fossil fuels. Today they're a lot cheaper, and that means things get a lot quicker from this point onwards. The report includes what might just be the most hopeful energy statistic we've ever seen: if wind and solar continue growing at the same rate they have in the last two decades, a 1.5°C target is still within reach.

The clean energy transition, unlike every other energy transition before it, is exponential. We're hitting the steep part of the curve now.

Vladimir Putin may have single-handedly done more to accelerate the clean energy transition than any person alive (with the exception maybe of Elon Musk). By invading Ukraine, he's made the moral logic of relying on fossil fuels abundantly clear - Europe has sent just over €1 billion in aid to Ukraine since the war started, but paid Russia more than €40 billion for gas, oil and coal. That's an ethical dilemma that's easier to understand than future sea rises in distant lands - and turns out to be a much better at motivating people to stop setting things on fire. For example...

Portugal is accelerating its energy transition, with a new goal to increase the share of renewables in electricity production to 80% by 2026, four years earlier than previously planned. "Portugal has already taken very significant measures in the energy transition, but the evolution and duration of the war in Ukraine must necessarily imply new measures.” PV Tech

Germany's new government just released the most ambitious clean energy target among all industrialised nations. It's the country's biggest energy reform in decades, a new policy that frees up land for clean energy production, speeds up permit procedures, and aims to achieve a 100% renewable power supply by 2035. Clean Energy Wire

Taiwan is planning a massive clean energy spending spree, in an effort to accelerate its energy transition. Government and state-owned companies will spend about $32 billion between 2022 and 2030 on renewable technologies, grid infrastructure and energy storage. Bloomberg

The EIA is reporting that 83% of all new power capacity added in the United States in 2021 was renewable, while fossil gas additions were down 50% compared to 2019. At this rate, even if the Build Back Better bill is not passed, the US grid will be predominantly powered by renewables well before 2040. Bloomberg

Or perhaps even sooner. The US set a major renewable energy milestone earlier this week: wind power was the country's second-highest source of electricity, edging out nuclear and coal for the first time since the EIA began gathering the data. Last year, wind was the fourth-largest electricity source. CNN

Japan's three largest banks, amongst the largest remaining financiers of coal in the world, have announced they will stop financing new thermal coal mining. The three institutions are thought to have billions of dollars in outstanding loans to the coal mining industry, a tally expected to decline gradually with the end of new financing. Nikkei

Texas and 15 other states are suing the EPA over its new fuel standards, which call for a 28% cut in vehicle emissions by 2026. But the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents nearly every major automaker, has sided with the EPA, saying it wants to make sure “critical regulatory provisions supporting electric vehicle technology are maintained.” Guess which side makes the cars? Yale360

This one's a little wonky, but also very big news. The IEA says it going to start making its data freely available for third party analysis, a massive win for energy researchers everywhere. This would never have happened without Our World in Data, who started this campaign in 2020. Huge kudos to Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie and the rest of their team for getting this one across the line.

A picture from the future: over 90% of vehicles sold in Norway last month were electric. Yes, it's a small country, yes incentives, but this shows what's possible, and how the switch is likely to happen sooner than many expect. What's particularly encouraging is seeing how EVs are starting to eat into overall distance travelled by all cars. Clean Technica

The only home we've ever known *

Australia has just created a 744,000 km² marine park around Christmas Island and the Cocos-Keeling atoll, south of Indonesia. Bigger than Texas, and over twice the size of the Great Barrier Reef marine park, it joins a network of 60 others around the country, spanning more than four million km² — a staggering 45% of Australia's waters. ABC

The US non-profit Rainforest Trust has protected over one million acres of habitat across Belize, Ecuador, Guatemala, Bangladesh, and Myanmar in 2022 alone. Since inception the trust has protected 38 million acres of habitat with 99% of forest area still standing post-protection. The trust is well on its way to achieving its pledge of an additional 125 million acres by 2025.

Nepal’s first official bird sanctuary, the Ghodaghodi Lake Complex, will protect over 360 bird species, including the endangered great hornbill, the lesser adjutant stork, and Indian spotted eagle. Spanning 2,563 hecta, the complex is one of the world’s most important wetlands, providing a critical wildlife corridor for animals like the Bengal tiger and red-crowned roofed turtle. Mongabay

The populations of two of the world’s most iconic animals – gorillas and rhinos - are benefiting from a new understanding that conservation can serve a dual goal of protecting wildlife and enhancing human livelihoods. In Assam, India, more than 400 poachers were offered salaries to become wildlife rangers, and as a result the population of the one-horned rhinoceros has registered an increase of 200. In Uganda, endangered mountain gorilla families hace welcomed at least 34 new babies during the pandemic, thanks to work of ranger/community groups established to mediate human-gorilla conflicts.

Communities around the world are reaping environment, economic and social benefits as the regenerative farming revolution gains momentum. Small family farms in middle America are facing a more secure future with Maryland and Pennsylvania well on their way to achieving rotational grazing targets. Meanwhile in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, 22 communities have restored more than 20,000 hectares of depleted land in the last two decades, and in the ‘golden triangle’ state of Durango a sustainable forestry project is raising the minimum wage while reducing illegal crop production and long-held stigmatisation for local communities.

We are restoring because we know it would be difficult to restore the land if left on its own. That doesn’t mean this stops with our intervention. Nature itself will follow. We just have to give her a push.
Idalia Lázaro, Forest Technician, Oaxaca, Mexico

Starbucks has joined a growing global movement to eliminate PFAS, a group of chemicals widely used in everyday products, and linked to a range of health problems, from cancer to thyroid and immune issues. The coffee giant will remove all PFAS in its packaging by the end of 2023. Burger King, McDonalds and Taco Bell have also committed to ending PFAS packaging by 2025. EHN

Californian rice farmers and ecologists have joined forces to restore Chinook salmon runs by flooding rice fields with water from the Sacramento River, mimicking the region’s original ecological rhythms. Inspired by traditional methods from Asia, the 'salmon-rice project' has recorded an 80% survival rate for juveniles, which are growing five times faster due to lush zooplankton from decomposed rice straws.

Svalbard's walruses are back. In 1952, they were almost extinct, thanks to more than 300 years of ivory hunting. So the Norwegian government banned commercial hunting of these endangered creatures, and they began to rebound. In 2006, there were 2,629 walruses in Svalbard. Today, that number is at 5,503. Smithsonian

Indistinguishable from magic

Two amazing new applications of machine learning. The first is from Nvidia, who've figured out how to get a neural network to convert any 2D image into a 360 degree, 3D version. The second is from Open-AI, who has updated their DALL-E system, which can take any text description and turn it into a picture.

Engineers from Stanford have invented a solar panel that works at night. The panels take advantage of the truly mind-blowing amount of energy that's emitted from the planet as infrared radiation. Using a small thermoelectric generator, they generate electricity from the temperature differential between their surface and the cooler air around them at night. IE

An idea from the realm of science fiction is now a reality. Say hello to the first ever drug-releasing contact lenses. These ones deliver anti-allergy medication, but the hope is that “forthcoming versions will have multiple therapeutic applications for various ocular diseases to improve overall health and quality of life." Wired

Here's another one. A small waste management company in Newfoundland is using Neal Stephenson’s ‘molecular disassembly line’ as a blueprint to revolutionize landfill. The company plans to repurpose waste into consumer products, starting with cod waste, to be turned into marine collagen, pet treats, protein powder, and cosmetics. Hakai

At the turn of this century, the first draft of the human genome was completed: a sequence of roughly three billion letters of DNA. But the blueprint was only partially complete, missing roughly 400 million letters, or 8% of the genes. Now, scientists have finally finished their quest. Behold: the first gap free sequence of a human genome, the most complete reference genome for any mammal so far.

Berlin's gigafactory has opened, and to celebrate, Tesla hired drone pilot Ferdinand Wolf from Skynamic to do a 'fly through.' Not too sure what's more impressive - the mad flying skillz, the sound design, or the factory. Welcome to the future.

Information superhighway

If it's got Laurie Penny in it, then it's an almost automatic inclusion for this newsletter. Here she is being interviewed in Current Affairs. "Even just basic considerations for others are now considered foolish because you’re not profiting from that. So you’re a sucker. Unless you’re a woman, in which case, you should be legally mandated to do that work. Otherwise, you’re evil in some way.

Professor Helen Thompson is one of the world's leading authorities on the geopolitics of energy - her recent book, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century, is excellent. It's a complex subject, and she's excellent at untangling the web in a way few others can. This interview in French foreign affairs journal, Le Grand Continent, is a pretty good demonstration.

Claire Evans says that robots aren't people - they're animals. Life, after all, doesn't needn’t be human. As she watches dolphins dance across the Pacific waves, she wonders: what is captivity, to a creature with an AI brain and silicone skin? Might robots too, someday, deserve to be free? Grow

You might have heard workers in Staten Island successfully created Amazon's first union over the weekend. This is a great profile on the duo behind it, Christian Smalls and Derrick Palmer. “I’ve been dealing with this machine for almost seven years now. If you’re stressed out and on edge, you’re gonna make the wrong decisions. So you just gotta keep the cool, calm and collected route." The City

Humankind

‘House of Fish’

Meet Paolo Fanciulli, a 62 year old Italian fisherman in the Tuscan seaside town of Talamone, who created an underwater sculpture gallery to protect his beloved coastline from the devastating impact of illegal fishing.

Paolo always loved the sea. Growing up he was fascinated by underwater shipwrecks, especially the fish and algae that lived in them, so it was no surprise when, at 13 years old, Paolo started working as a fisherman and spent the next few decades cruising around his idyllic patch of the Mediterranean in his small boat, the ‘Sirena’.

In the 1980s however, he noticed a change. Illegal trawlers were dragging weighted nets along the seafloor, destroying vast underwater meadows of seagrass that functions as a nursery for marine life. With fish stocks depleting, Paolo took matters into his own hands, pretending to be police to stop trawlers and joining activists to block a commercial port in Tuscany.

In 2006 Paolo and local authorities hatched a plan to drop concrete bollards in the sea to snag the trawling nets. The idea was solid, but Paolo knew something was missing. Remembering the beauty of the underwater shipwrecks he loved as a boy, Paolo wondered, what if instead of dropping blocks of concrete into the sea, he dropped art?

He approached the quarry in Carrara where Michelangelo sourced his marble, to donate two marble blocks for sculptures. The quarry donated 100 blocks. Word quickly spread about Paolo’s mission and successful artists signed up. In 2013, the 'House of Fish' sculpture park was officially launched with a total of 39 algae-covered sculptures currently on the seabed, and 12 more in the works. Illegal trawling has completely halted in the area and all forms of marine life are slowly returning.

Paolo is now on a mission to expand his gallery and protect more of the coastline. “If the sea dies, so does the fisherman. You can’t just take, you have to give too.”

That one's in the can. Thanks for reading! We'll see you next week, keep an eye out for a new charity announcement.

Much love,

Gus, Amy and the rest of the team