234: System Two

A limited-time offer for group subscriptions

This holiday season, why not give your team a year of Future Crunch? We're offering a discounted rate on all institutional subscriptions before the beginning of 2024. If you sign up for five people or more, we'll give you 33% off, and if you sign up for 20 or more, you'll get 50% off. It's a great way to spark conversations in the hallway, keep up to date with what's happening on the cutting edge of science and technology, and of course, give everyone a weekly hit of intelligent optimism.

Oh, and because it's got pretty pictures of forests and one third goes to charity, you might be able to get away with sticking it in the ESG budget.

Interested? Send us an email at info@futurecrunch.com.au

Over 90% of all our paying members renew their annual subscription. This speaks to the value members get once they’re inside the membership—or to put it in their own words:

Good news for people

A few years ago, Egypt had the world’s highest burden of hepatitis C, with around one in ten (9 million) Egyptians chronically infected. In one of the greatest-ever public health accomplishments by a country, it has screened its entire population, brokered a deal for drugs and cured almost everyone, and now it's trying to help other African countries do the same. NYT

Spain is reducing violence against women. In the two decades since 2003, there has been a 29.57% decline in murders, thanks to ongoing efforts to address this critical issue. Spain's experience shows that progress is possible, but also that the journey towards a violence-free world for women and girls is also far from over. Ministerio Del Interior

Since 2016, 25 million people in eastern and southern Africa have gained access to electricity, including 8.8 million people in Uganda and 6 million in Tanzania. Now a new program is aiming to bring clean energy access to 100 million people in up to 20 countries across the region over the next seven years. World Bank

Togo introduced the HPV vaccine, which prevents most cases of cervical cancer, into its routine immunisation system earlier this week. Prior to the introduction, a catch-up campaign ran from the 27th of November to the 1st of December for girls aged 9 to 14, reaching approximately 656,240 girls within that age group. Gavi

A court in Ecuador has ruled in favour of the Siekopai Nation’s claim to their ancestral homeland, Pë’këya, on the border of Ecuador and Peru, restoring property title for 42,360 hectares of some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet, and mandating public apologies for centuries of violence, racism, and conquest. El País

Our elders and our youth are so happy to finally return to our home, our spiritual heartland where our myths and the spirits from other dimensions await us. Although colonizers have tried to uproot us from this territory, they have failed. Now we have officially been able to recognize our land for the Siekopai, the Multi-Colored People.

Justino Pianguaje
Siekopai Leader

Vietnam has made incredible progress in reducing poverty in recent years, recording an average decline in its multidimensional poverty rate of 1-1.5% per year since 2016. It is expected that the poverty rate will fall to 2.93% by the end of this year, and a new target of 0.9% by 2025 was set at a conference last month. Vietnam+

The World Bank just approved $266.5 million for improving internet access in The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, and Mauritania, and for promoting a single digital market in West Africa. The program will make internet services in the region more affordable and unlock access for 1.3 million people, of whom at least 50% are women.

Don't tell anyone... but it's a golden age for workers.

Nepal has registered its first same-sex marriage, five months after its Supreme Court issued an interim order allowing same-sex couples to register their marriages. 'The fight for rights is not easy. We have done it. And it will be easier for future generations. The registration has opened doors to a lot of things for us.' BBC

The percentage of people living with HIV in South Africa, the country with the worst burden of the disease in the world, decreased from 14% in 2017 to 12.7% in 2022. Among people aged 15 years and older with HIV in 2022, 90% were aware of their status, 91% were on antiretroviral treatment, and 94% were virally suppressed. HSRC

The first results from the world’s biggest basic income experiment are in. 'So many people started their own businesses that overall wages in the village went up.'

The Ganges River is one of the world’s most sacred waterways—and one of its most polluted. To restore it, India is undertaking one of the biggest engineering programs in the history of sanitation. To date, it has cost $3.77 billion, and while results are still a long way from government claims, there has been genuine progress. Wired

Life expectancy in the US ticked up to 77.5 years in 2022, following two years of declines driven primarily by the pandemic. This is a 1.1-year increase from 2021, but still below the recent high of 78.8 years. 'We had this dip during the Covid-19 pandemic and now we’re clawing our way back to the numbers we saw in 2019.' NBC

The rate of child and teen cancer deaths in the United States fell 24% between 2001 to 2021, thanks to advancements in immunotherapy—despite diagnoses rising during the same time period. Death rates for leukaemia, the most common cancer in children, declined by 47%. NBC

GDP growth in the US was 5.2% last quarter (the best recovery from Covid-19 in the G7), inflation is falling, wage growth is 5%, median wealth is up 37% from 2020-2022 and has doubled for 18-34 year olds, and more Americans have jobs than at any other time in history. John Burn-Murdoch has an answer for why Americans are so bad at perceiving economic trends.

People don't believe what they see—they see what they believe. America is experiencing a sustained, consistent, decades-long decline in violent crime, but most of its citizens believe crime has never been worse. Jeff Asher has an answer for why Americans are so bad at perceiving crime trends.

'Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.'

Bernard M. Baruch
US Representative on the UN Atomic Energy Commission, 1946

Hope is a Verb, Season 2

Our podcast is coming back! A new season of stories, where you get to meet the heroes we never hear about. We're so excited to introduce you to our next group of people mending the world, we've already had some extraordinary conversations with them.

Season 2 of Hope is a Verb launches next week, Friday the 15th December. Check out the trailer, it should give you a good taste of what's in store. Please subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts to make sure you don't miss out on new episodes, dropping every Friday throughout the festive season.

Good news for the planet

We're blown away by the amazing new Climate TRACE tool, launched last weekend at COP28 by Al Gore's team. It allows anyone in the world with an internet connection to access a top-down, independent, and multi-source dataset of all the planet's sources of carbon emissions. Nowhere to hide anymore.

One of our favourite data points is that deforestation is dropping in key regions of the world. Emissions from deforestation and degradation declined by 56% and 87%, respectively, in Indonesia between 2015 and 2022, and by 7% and 19% in the Congo Basin in 2022 compared to 2021.

There might be some good news coming for the Amazon region, too. A new analysis has shown that deforestation across the nine Amazonian countries so far this year is down 55.8% from the same period a year ago, in a major turnaround for a region that's vital to curbing climate change. Reuters

Oh, and on Saturday, Brazil launched its $205 million Arc of Restoration program to restore degraded woodlands amounting to 60,000 km² (an area nearly the size of Latvia) in the Amazon by 2030. 'Avoiding deforestation is no longer the answer to the climate crisis. We need to be more ambitious.'

OK, fine, one more. Colombia just launched a new Fund for Life and Biodiversity to help protect ecosystems in the country that will manage close to $1 billion by 2026. The financial mechanism will allow environmental initiatives to receive monetary resources more than once, and will be managed by a trust. Reuters

England is getting a new national park as part of a set of 'nature pledges' to give greater access and protection to the countryside. 34 new landscape recovery projects will also be created under a farm payments scheme, which will see 200,000 hectares of land managed to benefit nature and sustainable food production. BBC

River restoration news. A $12 million project has kicked off on the Yakima River in Washington State; $4 million has been approved for the Crooked River in Oregon; in Idaho the Goat River is flowing again; in Australia, there is about to be a new $50.5 million package for the upper Murrumbidgee River; and in Scotland, £1.2 million has been awarded for catchment restoration of the Peffery River.

For over a decade, Ana María and David Borbóna have led the community restoration of the mangroves of Baja California Sur, Mexico, planting an estimated 1.2 million seedlings and transforming vast stretches of barren sand to green. 'We are not talking about sustainability. We are talking about regeneration—and it’s worth fighting for, whatever is required, because it’s necessary.' Hakai

Paying local residents to plant mangroves in Indonesia has raised incomes, increased fishery output, protected coastal areas, and contributed to efforts to mitigate climate change. Now the government has launched a new program to restore 600,000 ha of mangroves by 2024—the world’s largest mangrove restoration ambition to date. World Bank

Starting in January, most stores in Colorado won’t be allowed to provide single-use plastic carryout bags without charging a fee, and Rhode Island’s ban on plastic bags will launch on the same date. That makes 13 states across the United States that now ban single-use plastic carryout bags statewide. Florida Phoenix

The island nation of St Kitts and Nevis has launched a campaign to educate the public about its impending plastic ban. The government will, on the 30th of June next year, ban the sale of plastic shopping bags, and on the 30th of September, the sale of styrofoam food containers, trays, and plastic straws. Jamaica Observer

Wolverines in the contiguous United States will be listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, earning them additional federal protections. The move comes after years of legal back-and-forth over the survival prospects of the animals amid climate change and other human activities. Smithsonian

If you're going to read one story this week, please make it this one, about eccentric Englishman Brendon Grimshaw and the world's smallest national park. BBC

What if we save the world?

Another week, another report predicting that 2023 will see peak carbon emissions from the power sector. 'Coal has dominated the global power sector for the past 30 years, but Rystad Energy modelling shows that 2024 will mark the start of the fuel’s decline as solar and wind generation grow in popularity.'

Most people don’t realise how much progress we’ve made this year on clean energy. We are on track to install 413 GW of solar in 2023, 58% more than in 2022, which itself marked an almost 42% increase from the 183 GW installed in 2021. That means the world's solar capacity has doubled in the last 18 months. PV Magazine

Mixed news coming out of COP28. On the one hand, all the shenanigans you'd expect with an oil executive in charge; on the other hand, the target of tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030 has already been endorsed by 118 countries, and a formal phase-out of fossil fuels is being considered as part of a final deal.

If these targets are met, the share of renewables in global power generation would increase from 40% in 2022 to 60% in 2023, and the share of non-fossil energy would reach 70%. This would enable emissions from the electricity sector to be cut by 45% by 2030, an enormous drop in just eight years. Ember

Very big and very good news. The United States now has the most protective methane pollution limits in the world. The EPA’s new limits on oil and gas methane pollution are a vital win for the climate as well as public health, dramatically reducing warming pollution and providing vital clean air protections to millions of Americans. NYT

Renewable energy in the United States is set for a milestone in 2024. The EIA is now projecting that both gas- and coal-fired electricity generation will be driven downward next year by renewables, despite an expected increase in overall electricity demand. IEEFA

Nowhere is that growth speeding up more rapidly than in Texas, which just overtook California as the leading state for renewable energy. 'We didn't do it for the cleanliness. We didn't do it for climate change. We did it because it makes us a lot of money for the landowners and saves us a lot of money for the consumers.' PBS

Electric vehicle sales in the United States were up 54% in the first three quarters of 2023 over 2022, and last month they zipped past a major milestone: 1 million full battery-electric vehicles sold in a single year. Ford F-150 Lightning sales just broke their monthly record, doubling in November, and Hyundai achieved its best-ever November sales.

Somebody might want to tell the editors at The Hill, a supposedly reputable media outlet, since they're still approving headlines like this. At what point does shamelessness become outright dishonesty?

BUTDAMINERALZ!!!

A new study shows there's enough lithium under a dried-up lake in California to build batteries for 382 million electric vehicles. There are fewer than 300 million cars and trucks registered in the US today. 'This could make the US completely self-sufficient in lithium so we’re no longer importing it via China.' Electrek

What's going to happen to all those EV batteries when they reach the end of their lives? Most of them will get a second life as stationary storage, before being recycled. Doing so could increase supply chain sustainability and reduce the need to mine critical minerals, while providing a cheaper way of building grid-scale storage. Grist

'On the outskirts of Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany, nestled among car dealerships and hardware shops, sits a two-storey factory stuffed with solar-power secrets. It’s here where UK firm Oxford PV is producing commercial solar cells using perovskites: cheap, abundant photovoltaic materials that some have hailed as the future of green energy.' Nature

Great article showing how climate change is driving a global youth revolution, emphasising their innovative approaches and global interconnectedness. 'The difference is generational rather than by countries. And that is stronger than gender, economic background, politics – stronger than anything.' CSM

Indistinguishable from magic

Google's new fully-autonomous robotics system, known as the A-Lab, devises recipes for new materials, carries out the synthesis, and analyses the products, while another AI system has predicted the existence of more than two million new materials. Together, these advances may accelerate the discovery of materials for clean-energy, next-generation electronics and a host of other applications. Nature

Inside the plan for one of the most ambitious energy projects in the world, a vast 200 km² complex of as-yet-unbuilt solar panels and wind turbines in the Moroccan desert attached to a pair of 3,800-km long cables that will shadow the coasts of Portugal, northern Spain, and southwestern France, jut out to sea in a wide arc around Brittany and Cornwall, and then make landfall in North Devon.

An ultra-thin wearable device capable of reproducing the localised sensation of touch has been developed at the Italian Institute of Technology. It looks similar to temporary kids' tattoos—a few micrometers thick and designed to arouse a tactile sensation, thus generating a force that pushes on the skin of the person who is wearing it, who can then perceive a touch. Tech Xplore

IBM just unveiled a new quantum computing chip and machine called Quantum System Two, which uses three 'Heron' cryogenically cooled chips, that it says could serve as the building blocks of much larger and faster systems than traditional silicon-based computers. 'We are firmly within the era in which quantum computers are being used as a tool to explore new frontiers of science.' Guardian

Scientists have developed tiny robots made of human cells that are able to repair damaged neural tissue. The ‘anthrobots’ were made using human tracheal cells and might, in future, be used in personalised medicine. This research grew out of the work previously done on the 'xenobots' we reported on here a few years ago, pointing the way to ‘tissue engineering 2.0.' Nature

A deep brain stimulation implant developed by researchers at Stanford has allowed people with brain injuries to concentrate, read, remember, drive properly, and get through the day without napping again. The therapy proved so effective that researchers had trouble completing the final phase of the study—switching off the device for three random participants—after two patients declined.

Scientists at MIT and the National Institutes of Health have developed a new search algorithm that has identified 188 previously-unreported CRISPR-linked systems in bacterial genomes, encompassing thousands of individual systems. The new systems could potentially be harnessed to edit mammalian cells with fewer off-target effects than current Cas9 systems. Freethink

Often, when we report news about CRISPR, it can come across as pretty impersonal. If you want to understand what the fuss is about, read this account from Jimi Olaghere, one of the first people in the world to be cured from sickle cell disease thanks to exa-cel, the gene editing treatment that just gained approval in the UK in mid-November. MIT

That's all for this week, thanks for reading.

Quite a few of you have contacted us to ask when our end of year list is coming out. You'll be pleased to hear it's dropping next Thursday. We'll send you a reminder in advance.

With love,

Gus and Amy