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.
Hi everyone, interrupting regular programming to ask a favour. We've been running the newsletter in its current form for around two years and as we've already mentioned, it's time to take it in to the mechanic for a service and perhaps a bit of an overhaul. The best way to do that is by getting some feedback from you.
We've created a survey with a series of questions designed to help us figure out where we can improve, and what direction we should take next. Of course, we know nobody voluntarily fills out forms on the internet these days, so in an obvious attempt to b̶r̶i̶b̶e̶ gently incentivize you, we're going to enter everyone who completes the full survey into a draw to win a US$200 Patagonia voucher.*
You can get something pretty nifty with that! We'll announce the winner in our next edition. Thanks for riding along with us on the journey. We are as always, so grateful for the support and attention.
* If you're wondering why we chose Patagonia, this might help.
Good news you probably didn't hear about
This is going to sound crazy, but did you know that global economic inequality has actually decreased since 2011? The size of the global middle class increased by around 68%, while the proportion of people earning less than $10K a year fell substantially. This reflects the growing prosperity of emerging economies in the last decade, a story most of us hardly ever hear about. Credit Suisse
There's been substantial progress in South America in eliminating river blindness, a severe, disfiguring parasitic skin disease. A program launched in the 1990s has eliminated it completely in Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Guatemala, and reduced the number of people at risk from over half a million to just 35,518, scattered across the Brazil-Venezuela border. WHO
India is on track to meet its SDG targets on child mortality. New figures released by the country's Registrar General show that between 2019 and 2020 there was a 8.6% decline in under five mortality, a 6.7% decline in infant mortality, and a 9.1% decline in neonatal mortality. Economic Times
The American Cancer Society says breast cancer death rates in the United States dropped by 43% between 1989 and 2020. As a result, 460,000 breast cancer deaths were averted in US women during this period. The average five year survival rate is now over 90%, up from around 70% back in the early 1980s.
You might remember that earlier this year we reported Hawaii has reached the milestone of having no girls in its only youth correctional facility — a first in state history. Here's a great story from NBC on how they pulled that off, and how it could be a model for other states to follow.
Violent crime continues to fall in the United States. Between 2012 and 2021, the rate of violent victimization (sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault) declined from 26.1 to 16.5 incidents per 1,000 people. Wouldn't it be nice if this data from Department of Justice appeared in any news outlet other than this one?
Five years after #MeToo went viral, seven in ten adults in the United States say that people who commit sexual harassment in the workplace are now more likely to be held responsible for their actions, and about six in ten say that those who report harassment or assault at work are more likely to be believed. Pew
India's Supreme Court has upheld the right of a woman to an abortion up to 24 weeks into pregnancy regardless of marital status, a decision widely hailed by women's rights activists. This overturns a law dating from 1971, which limited the procedure to married women, divorcees, widows, minors, 'disabled and mentally ill women' and survivors of sexual assault or rape. Reuters
The Dominican Republic has passed legislation enshrining the rights of domestic workers. They will now have access to minimum wage, defined working hours, insurance coverage, workplace injury protection, survival and disability benefits and inclusion in state pension programs. Latina Republic
The road has been long and the journey arduous, but thanks to the will of the sectors involved, today we can say that the Dominican Republic is a country with more social justice, a country in which all workers are recognized with all their rights.
Luis Miguel De Camps García, Minister of Labor, Dominican Republic
We're amazed at the bravery of the protestors in Iran at the moment. Have you heard Baraye yet? It's the anthem of the movement, a song that reached 40 million views in two days before being taken down by the authorities. Do yourself a favour and listen to the music and lyrics.
The only home we've ever known
"No new extinctions." Australia has unveiled an ambitious ten-year recovery plan for threatened species, including the prevention of any new native animal or plant extinctions. The government has pledged $224.5 million towards the project, and committed to conserving 30% of the continent's land mass. Australian Geographic
Spain has become the first country in Europe to give personhood status to an environmental entity - legally recognising the rights of the Mar Menor lagoon to exist as an ecosystem and evolve naturally. More than 600,000 citizens backed the initiative after the lagoon suffered massive degradation from coastal development and local farming. Euro News
Did you know last year's infrastructure bill, passed by the US government, contains more than $55 billion in funding for water projects? The first tranche of funding, totalling $7.4 billion, went out at the end of last year, and now another tranche of $1.3 billion has been awarded to 18 states. ENR
After seven years of lobbying, 661,416 hectares of wetland in Argentina has been declared as a new protected area, the Ansenuza National Park. It’s the largest wetland in South America and a crucial ecosystem for 66% of all migratory and shorebird species, including three species of flamingos. WHSRN
Conservationists are celebrating the recovery of the snail darter, a small freshwater fish native to the Tennessee river. In the 1970s, the fish became the focus of a Supreme Court ruling and an act of Congress when a proposed dam threatened its extinction. It was transplanted to the Hiwassee and Holston rivers and today can be found in several additional locations. Mirage
New fishing regulations will ban bottom trawling in Kattegatt, a 30,000 km² sea area between Sweden & Denmark, which is home to porpoises and endangered Swedish shark species. Conservation groups have fought for the measures for over a decade and the new regulations are now the strongest in Europe. Greenpeace
New animal welfare legislation in New Zealand will ban live animal exports by sea from April 2023. Although the country only exports animals for breeding, not slaughter, its remoteness means animals are at sea for extended periods, heightening welfare-associated risks. Guardian
After been hunted to extinction 400 years ago, Eurasian beavers have been declared a protected species in England, making it illegal to capture, kill, injure, or disturb them. Wildlife organisation have praised the move, saying beavers' dams help keep water clean and prevent flooding and drought. BBC
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
The fight against climate change is going to change more in the next four years than it has in the past 40. The great story of our lives is just beginning.
~ Robinson Meyer
Two great pieces this week, from two of our favourite analysts. The first is from Michael Liebreich, on how Putin has set in motion forces that will accelerate the end of the fossil fuel era on which his imperial ambitions were built, and the second is from Robinson Meyer, on why the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act is going to be bigger than anyone thinks.
Based on the headlines, you'd expect the global energy crisis to have caused an increase in coal and gas in 2022. Except that's not what happened, at least in the electricity sector. In the first half of 2022, renewables and hydro met all of the growth in global electricity demand, preventing a 4% increase in fossil generation, avoiding $40 billion in fuel costs, and avoiding 230 Mt of CO2.
It's worth drilling down on the numbers for the world's four biggest emitters. In China, wind and solar additions caused fossil fuel power to fall 3%, rather than rise by 1%. In India, they slowed down the rise from 12% to 9%, and in the United States, from 7% down to 1%. In Europe, they prevented a major carbon bomb; without wind and solar, fossil fuel generation would have risen by 16% instead of 6%.
Why are we reporting this for the third edition in a row? Because meeting additional global demand with clean electricity is the first step to stopping growth in fossil fuels. Only once we achieve that can we begin phasing dirty energy down. Huge, huge milestone for the global clean energy transition. Ember
Portugal has raised its debut offshore wind power auction target to 10 GW, more than three times the target at the start of 2022. That kind of capacity should be able to produce around 45 TWh a year, equivalent to 90% of the country's 2021 national electricity consumption. In a single auction. Reuters
Utility scale solar is now a third cheaper than fossil gas in the United States, "presenting a deflationary opportunity for electric supply costs" (hello Inflation Reduction Act). That's why there is now a mind-bending amount of solar in the country's interconnection queues, 674 GW to be precise, 284 GW of which includes batteries. Bloomberg
Last week Australia, this week Germany. The country's largest coal power company, RWE, which owns more than a quarter of the remaining coal fleet, is bringing forward its phaseout date by eight years to 2030, and the largest coal miner, LEAG, is investing €10 billion to turn 33,000 hectares of its mining assets into Germany's largest green energy hub.
Can Europe decarbonize its heavy industry? The answer, increasingly, seems to be yes, thanks to tougher emissions targets, rising carbon prices, changing consumer demand and most importantly, low carbon technologies coming of age. More than 70 projects across the continent are now commercialising decarbonization in basic-materials industries. Economist
Ford's electric vehicle sales tripled in September, driving an increase of 16% in overall deliveries in the latest quarter. The company's increased the price of the electric F-15o twice in the last month. Also, responding to 'overwhelming demand,' the EPA is nearly doubling the money available to states to buy electric models of the iconic yellow school buses that millions of children ride every day.
New York is following in California’s footsteps with a new regulation that requires all new passenger cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs to be zero emissions by 2035. Oh, and electric vehicle charging sites now outnumber petrol stations in Manhattan by ten to one, and are fast approaching parity across all five boroughs. Autoblog
Want to see how quickly a market can turn? In 2020, electric vehicles accounted for 5% of all new car sales in China. In 2021, the proportion had shot up to 13%, blowing every forecast out of the water. For 2022, electric cars are on track to hit more than the a quarter of all car sales. At this pace, the world’s second-largest consumer of oil will hit peak petrol next year. Exponential View
Indistinguishable from magic
Now operating in a fast food restaurant near you, Flippy 2, a robot which handles all the deep frying of French fries, onions and other foods. Far from being upset, most staff are delighted, as manning the fry station is the job they hate the most. They're more than happy to give it to a machine that can do it in half the time. Reuters
AI prompts: it's madness out there people. So many insane breakthrough it's hard to know where to start. Here's one example, Phenaki: a machine-learning model for generating videos from text, with prompts that can change over time, and videos that can be as long as multiple minutes. Insane. Also, if you need an overview, Cleo Abrams has a great 15 minute video.
Doctors from Boston University have completed a 13-week trial of a bionic pancreas involving 219 people with type 1 diabetes at multiple sites. The pancreas, which has been in the works for almost 20 years, proved to be better than gold standard monitoring devices, giving its users an additional 2.6 hours a day of glucose levels within the target range.
Two big recent drug breakthroughs. Japanese scientists have shown that a drug called lecanemab slows cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s by 27%, in the first ever definitively positive large clinical trial to slow the disease down. And at the University of Georgia, researchers have identified AN15368, the first medicine with the potential to target Chagas disease in more than 50 years.
Scientists in Singapore have figured out a way to make lab-grown meat by zapping it with a magnetic field, rather than feeding it with the blood of foetuses excised from pregnant cattle, the main way cultured meat is grown at the moment. Needless to say, magnets are a big improvement over dead baby cows. NUS
Stanford bioengineers have developed a genetic toolkit that controls whether the root systems of two plant species grow more laterally or horizontally, and how much the roots branch. Their work shows for the first time that it’s possible to program functional patterns of gene activity over time in specific tissues of complex organisms. Quanta
Straight out of Luc Besson's wildest fantasies, a Parisian fashion house has sprayed liquid made from wool, mohair, cotton, nylon and cellulose onto the body of model Bella Hadid that solidified into a white dress, which was then customized with off-the-shoulder straps and a thigh-high slit. Fashion history or just a gimmick? Don't ask us. We're just here for the sci-fi.
The information highway is still super
What does the future hold? Here's the pessimistic view, from notorious grump Niall Ferguson: "today’s trends feel more like 75% bad than 75% good." And here's the optimistic one, from former Wired editor Peter Leyden, "structural developments are aligning to create a 21st-century society of abundance." Are we all doomed, or on the cusp of a new golden age?
The answer as always is (come on you should know this by now) yes.
One of the Roman Empire's most sought-after products was a golden-flowered miracle plant called Silphion, reputed to cure an array of ailments, and crucial for spicing up any chef's kitchen. Long thought to be extinct, this 'chemical gold mine' has been rediscovered by a Turkish botanist more than a thousand years after disappearing from history. Nat Geo
The Onion just submitted an amicus brief to the US Supreme Court in support of the right to create parody, and it's a thing of beauty. Wondering what it means to show rather than tell? This might be one of the best examples we've ever seen. US Supreme Court
Amidst the sudden wellness craze for swearing off booze - dancing soberfluencers who soberglow while #soberaf - Virginia Heffernan wonders what's wrong with getting sober the old-fashioned way? "The way I learned it, to get sober is not to stop drinking. It’s to undertake a program that is chronically uncool in the quaint hope that it will make you a better person." Wired
Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who specializes in the modern history of Central and Eastern Europe, on how the Russo-Ukraine war ends (hint: almost certainly not in nuclear catastrophe). War is a form of politics, and defeat changes all the equations. For the actors concerned, it might be bad to lose in Ukraine, but it is worse to lose in Russia.
Epic story about the Golden Globe Race, in which entrants sail solo and nonstop around the world without modern technology. "She felt the stern rise. Sound returned in a deafening roar. Clinging to the post by the radio, she was suddenly looking down at the rest of the cabin. She went airborne as a leviathan of water she couldn’t see but only feel somersaulted the boat." Atavist
Humankind
The Climate Entrepreneur
Meet Marjan Minnesma, a 56 year old climate entrepreneur from the Netherlands who was behind the world’s first climate liability lawsuit in which she sued her government for failing to protect its people from climate change - and won.
Marjan was born and raised in a small town outside Amsterdam with a strong sense of her individual power to change the world. After studying business administration, philosophy, and law, she forged a career across a range of fields from international law to academia as well as stints at Shell and Greenpeace.
Despite her passion for environmentalism, Marjan never considered herself an activist - she wanted to find new ways of tackling the issue as a climate entrepreneur. Propelled by her personal motto of don’t talk, just act, Marjan co-founded Urgenda in 2005, an organisation committed to speeding up climate-change solutions. Under her leadership, Urgenda organised the first collective buying initiative for solar panels in the Netherlands and introduced the first electric car.
In 2010, things seemed to be looking up when EU member states adopted targets for cutting emissions. But as time passed without any action from the Dutch government, Marjan argued it was failing to uphold its legal obligation to protect people from climate change. In November 2013 she filed a lawsuit, demanding a 25% reduction in greenhouse gases from 1990 levels.
To strengthen her case, Marjan pioneered a hybrid of crowdfunding and citizen science called crowd-pleading in which people researched similar court cases and submitted their own arguments. In June 2015, Marjan and her 886 co-plaintiffs achieved a landmark victory when the Hague’s district court ruled the Dutch government had breached its duty of care.
Over the next four years, Marjan ramped up her mission as the government escalated their appeals to the Supreme Court. She collaborated with 800 NGOs and businesses to create 54 concrete measures that the government could adopt and in December 2019, the Supreme Court issued an extraordinary ruling, ordering the Dutch state to limit emissions to 25% below 1990 levels by 2020.
The success of Marjan’s case has sparked a growing wave of lawsuits around the world, with 60 currently in progress. After three decades of working on sustainable solutions, Marjan believes real power is not about fighting against things, but in creating the change you want.
Even if everybody says it’s impossible, don’t listen to all the negative people. Go for your own thing and keep hope.
That's all for this edition, thanks for reading! We're off next week, so we'll see you in a fortnight with the results of that survey, and the winner of the $200 Patagonia voucher. Here's the survey link again:
Much love,
Gus, Amy and the rest of the team
