The Crunch No. 137: The Milky Way is Beautiful, and Nobody is Horny
Plus, gene-splicing algae into humans, transparent rockets, a terrible week for Big Oil, and good news on HIV/AIDS, falling prison rates in the United States, deforestation rates in Indonesia, and panthers in Florida.
Hi everyone Gus here, staggering back into the light after two months of paternity 'leave' with a lot of new gray hairs and at least seventy years of sleep debt. Cleo is definitely the cutest baby in the world and Sammy and I are thrilled to be parents to her and Lola, our two beautiful little girls, but wow it's been intense. People give you this look when you tell them you're going to have two children under two, and I thought I understood what their eyes were telling me but I definitely didn't. I think I do now.
Thankfully Amy and Tane have done an excellent job holding down the fort while I've been manically jiggling cots and cleaning crayons off carpets, to the point where I don't think my absence was even noted. Unfortunately we did miss an issue last week after Melbourne got thrown into a fourth snap lockdown so I'd like to apologize, we hate doing that and we hope you'll forgive us, it really has been a bit of a rollercoaster.
Fortunately that means this is another bumper edition, with some incredible stories, including the ones that gave us the issue name which we're a tiny bit proud of. While we've got your attention we'd like to let you know that over the next few weeks we're going to be shaking it up a little bit here with some new sections, more of a personal 'voice' and some tighter copy. All good media has to evolve and this newsletter is no exception.
We'll try out these new experiments for a few weeks and then touch base again via a survey to see whether you like the changes, or if you'd prefer us to go back to a more formal style. Without further ado, let's kick off with a brand new section whose time definitely feels like it's come, dedicated entirely to good news stories about clean energy and climate change...
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
A Black Wednesday for the oil industry, after a triple whammy of historic blows. Exxon Mobil lost a fight with shareholders last week over its reluctance to account for climate change, while Chevron's investors instructed the company to cut its emissions, and a Dutch court ordered Shell to slash emissions by 45% by 2030. “There’s no going back to where things were for oil and natural gas.” Politico
Eight Australian high school students and a Catholic nun may have doomed coal's future, following a court ruling that the federal environment minister has a duty of care to avoid harm to young people from climate change. This is an even bigger deal that the Shell ruling, because Australia is the world's largest exporter of coking coal and the second-largest for thermal coal. Reuters
The world's seven largest advanced economies have agreed to stop international financing of coal projects that emit carbon by the end of this year, and phase out support for all fossil fuels. This announcement leaves China isolated as the lender of last resort for promoters of new international coal projects. ABC
It’s adiós to oil and gas drilling in Spain, following new legislation requiring the complete phase out of fossil fuel production by 2042. Sales of ICE vehicles will be banned by 2040, and 74% of the country’s electricity must be renewable by 2030. Spain joins Denmark, France and Ireland in legislating the EU’s target of carbon neutrality by 2050. Grist
South Korea's $774.1 billion National Pension Service, the third largest pension fund in the world, will cease investments related to the construction of coal-fired power plants at home and abroad. That's the 51st coal exit policy from a financial institution announced this year, a 61% increase over 2020. Pensions & Investments
One fifth of all cars rolling off the production lines in Germany are now hybrid or electric. This is an astonishing change for the fourth largest maker of cars in the world - manufacturers are now producing 74,000 EVs a month, and Volkswagen is now the third largest EV maker in the world after Tesla and Renault-Nissan. The Driven
Why do all of these stories matter? They matter because they show the tide has turned. The fossil fuels industry is now firmly on the wrong side of both history and company balance sheets and there's nowhere else left to run. Carbon needs to be accounted for, there is no escaping it. The science has been telling us, our experience of wildfires, freak summers and extended winters has been telling us, and now finally, the mood music is telling us, from the courtrooms of The Hague to the boardrooms of Seoul and the factory lines of Zwickau.
We've been singing this tune in this newsletter for years now, and to finally see both the economic and political realities catch up to the scientific and technological ones feels a little unreal, and incredibly hopeful. Plenty more of this kind of thing still to come, we'll keep you up to date with all of it right here.
Good news you probably didn't hear about
A new report from the WHO says there were 1.5 million new HIV infections in 2020, a decline of 30% since 2010, and the lowest total number since 1990. The UN's 90-90-90 targets are inching closer: 81% of people living with HIV know their status, 67% are receiving ARVs (up from 20% in 2010), 59% have suppressed viral loads, and 85% of pregnant women are receiving ARVs. Mirage
The same report says that 9.4 million people around the world are now receiving treatment for Hepatitis C, an almost 10-fold increase from the baseline of one million at the end of 2015. This scale-up of treatment has been sufficient to reverse the global trend of increasing mortality from Hepatitis C for the first time ever. ReliefWeb
The US government has put an end to the so-called Migrant Protection Protocols — known as the "Remain in Mexico" program, requiring asylum seekers to return to Mexico until their court dates in the United States. Advocates are calling it a “huge victory” that will save thousands of innocent people from squalid conditions and extortion, sexual assault, and kidnapping. Common Dreams
Ecuador has become the latest country in Latin America to be swept up in the 'green wave' abortion rights movement, following a ruling by the country's Constitutional Court decriminalizing abortion in cases of rape. “Never again will women be threatened with jail time, preventing them from making decisions about their reproductive life." Al Jazeera
Prisons across America are being repurposed into homeless shelters, educational farms, and even movie studios as years of declining crime rates force prison closures. Thanks to alternative penalties for non-violent crimes, the number of people incarcerated in the United States in 2020 plummeted by 17% to 1.7 million. AP
The danger in having prisons that are not either repurposed or, to be honest, torn down, is that there will always be an incentive to lock more people up - Nicole Porter | The Sentencing Project
The only home we've ever known
The US government has suspended all drilling leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the country's largest tracts of untouched wilderness, and home to migrating waterfowl, caribou and polar bears. It's a big win for environmental groups and First Nations people who have campaigned to stop drilling for decades. NYT
Six years after the toxic haze crisis, the Indonesian government has restored more than 2 million hectares of damaged, carbon-rich peatlands and enhanced protection of the country's mangroves. The policy reset was driven by environmentalists who demanded action to curb fires, and last year, the country achieved its fourth consecutive year of decline in deforestation. Reuters
Glasgow has given the green light to a plan to create a massive urban forest consisting of 18 million trees in and around the city over the next 10 years. The Clyde Climate Forest will be planted in streets, former industrial or mining areas, as well as in the countryside and on the edges of farming land, increasing forest cover in the area from 17% to 20%. BBC
60 organizations, including Coles, Woolworths, Nestle and Coca-Cola have signed an ANZPAC plastics pact, that will make all plastic packaging in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025. This landmark intervention comes after three years of negotiations and will drastically reduce the amount of waste that ends up in landfill and the ocean each year. ABC
The population of the critically endangered Saiga antelope in Kazakhstan has more than doubled to 842,000 since 2019. It’s a massive rebound for a species that made international headlines in 2015 after 200,000 animals died from a nasal bacterium spread in unusually warm weather. France24
The Florida panther has rebounded from a population of 20 to 200 in three decades. The long road to recovery began in 1995 with legislation for a genetic restoration plan, and just received another big boost from lawmakers with $100 million for land conversation and to build highway underpasses along migration corridors. NPR
This is a conservation success story that belongs to Florida and Floridians, and can be a real model of nature and people working together - Carlton Ward Jr | National Geographic photographer
Indistinguishable from magic
Apparently IBM didn't get the Moore's Law Is Dead memo. They've just created the first 2 nanometre chip - 50 billion transistors on a chip the size of a fingernail. These chips are still a few years away from arriving in our laptops and phones, but when they do they'll provide a 45% performance boost, and four times the battery life. Engadget
Canadian researchers have trained a machine-learning model on routine data like BMI and blood pressure from 1.7 million patients, to predict type 2 diabetes with an accuracy rate of 80%. Using this kind of technology in real life clinical settings obviously raises plenty of ethical and privacy issues, but if done with care gives doctors a powerful new diagnostic tool for the future. CTV
A self driving truck just transported a load of watermelons 1,528 km from Arizona to Oklahoma ten hours faster than the legal limit for human drivers. A human drove for 20% of the trip, while a machine did the other 80%. We've been doing this with planes for a while (commercial pilots fly an average of six minutes per flight). Stands to reason long distance trucking would be next. IE
Google and Harvard researchers just created the most detailed map yet of the cerebral cortex, containing 50,000 cells and 130 million synapses. It's an amazing achievement that reveals just how complex the brain is: the sample was 1 mm3, a millionth the size of an adult brain, yet generated 1.4 petabytes of data, which is insanely large, and only really analyzable thanks to machine learning. New Atlas
This one is pure sci-fi, no idea why it wasn't front page news everywhere. Scientists in Europe and the US have successfully restored human vision by taking the genetic instructions for a protein from light-sensing algae, and placing it into a blind person's eye, giving them the ability to distinguish light and dark, and make out basic shapes. Say hello to optogenetics “a new field is being born.” STAT
Have you ever wondered how rockets actually get to space? Check out this amazing visualization of real time fuel burn for (from left-to-right) the Saturn V, the Space Shuttle, Falcon Heavy and the Space Launch System. The attention to detail in the full video is worth checking out. Sometimes, a picture really does say a thousand words. Youtube
Information superhighway
Raquel Benedict has a very, very good point. Whatever happened to sex in movies? The bodies have gotten more beautiful, but nobody seems horny any more, except for fighting. Bonus points for Starship Troopers reference and also for introducing us to the publication we never knew we needed: Blood Knife "a digital magazine about sci-fi, horror, and capitalism."
There's an entire genre on the internet now where bewildered GenXer/millennial visits TikTok Hype House and is horrified/amazed/makes obligatory Andy Warhol reference. There's a long historical tradition too, the fabled “Great Man amongst the youth" essay. Even so, Barrett Swanson's overwritten account of his descent into the madness is compelling reading. This cannot end well. Harpers
Speaking of GenXers, Johnny Knoxville is now 50 years old. How on earth did that happen? This unexpectedly poignant profile shows that given enough time, anyone can become a national treasure. Reading this, we couldn't help thinking that a willingness to deliberately inflict pain on ourselves might be one of the most human qualities of all. GQ
A fresh take on the age-old question “Who am I?” Kathleen Wallace explores the concept of the Network Self, which views a person as an ever-changing, inter-relational set of social, physical, genetic, emotional, and biological processes. There's an answer here to why knowing ourselves is a constantly evolving question, and a great new framework for thinking about personal growth. Aeon
Heart-breaking and beautiful. Suzanne Simard, a professor of forest ecology, and the primary inspiration for Richard Powers’s The Overstory, tells her own story, of chasing wolves through the forests of British Columbia while pregnant. Woven through, her dawning discovery that trees share not just mycorrhizal networks amongst their roots, but actual carbon too. Neoma
Did you know there's an entire subculture of photography dedicated to the Milky Way? Yeah, neither did we. Check out these astonishing pictures from the 2021 Milky Way Photographer of the Year, a journey from the remote deserts of the American Wild West to the unfamiliar landscapes of the Australian Outback, passing by spectacular glaciers, volcanoes, mountains, beaches.
Humankind
Meet Mark Melton, a 43 year old tax attorney in Dallas who has become a defender of tenants, helping over 6,000 people around Texas avoid eviction as the pandemic wreaked financial havoc across the state.
Mark’s mission began in April 2020 when he noticed the rising number of people been evicted from their homes. Putting his professional skills to use, he brushed up on eviction law and offered free legal advice over Facebook. The response was overwhelming. Unable to service the volume of demands alone, Mark recruited 175 other attorneys and created the Dallas Eviction Advocacy Centre, a non-profit, pro-bono legal service to help renters understand their rights, and get access to financial assistance.
In the past 13 months, Mark and his team have taken on a wide range of issues from negotiating with landlords to court hearings and helping people source groceries. After hundreds of hearings, the team have lost only two cases. “If you have a lawyer with you, your likelihood of getting evicted is much lower.”
Mark’s mission is a personal one. At the age of 21, he was married with two kids, when he lost his job at a large collection agency in Tulsa and the bank foreclosed on his house. Without a college degree or job prospects, Mark and his wife sold all their possessions, packed up their kids and drove their Honda Civic to Dallas to find better opportunities. After putting himself through college while working two jobs, Mark eventually graduated with a law degree. Mark credits his success to the help he got along the way and this gratitude drives him to pay it forward and help as many people as he can.
I relate to that sense of just complete and utter desperation and the necessity to rely on the charity of others just to get the most basic of things. If I shut down or break down and quit, there’s going to be more people living on the streets as a result, and I just can’t do that.
OK, we are all done and I'm rushing off to do the pick up from daycare, thanks as always for reading, and apologies again for last week's missed edition. We hope this one made up for it.
Much love,
Gus, Amy and the rest of the FC team.