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.
Good news you probably didn't hear about
A gentle reminder that as of Tuesday this week, over three billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered around the world. Most media outlets are focusing on how badly the rollout is going, and while those criticisms are valid in some countries (8% in four months is hard to spin, even for Scotty From Marketing), globally the numbers tell a very different story. Not that you'd know it from the headlines, but the pace is picking up: it took 20 weeks to give out the first billion doses, but only four to give out the last billion.
This is easily the biggest and fastest vaccination effort in human history. Our species has never done anything remotely like this before. The manufacturing and distribution challenges are unfathomably hard, and that's before you get to the all-too-human problems of bureaucratic screwups, political cynicism, and a natural distrust of any new technology. Given the obstacles, it's amazing that we've got this far, this quickly. Perhaps a moment of appreciation is in order?
A moment of appreciation too, for a successful, multi-generational effort to eliminate malaria in China. It's the 40th nation in the world to achieve malaria-free status, and the first in the western Pacific region in 30 years. Not bad for a country that used to report 30 million cases per year in the 1940s. Some good news from Tanzania too, which will allow pregnant girls and teen mothers the opportunity to resume secondary education, overturning a 4-year ban that prevented thousands from finishing their studies.
In Canada, a welcome win for LGBTQI+ rights with the passage of a historic bill criminalizing conversion therapy. It joins Germany, Malta, Ecuador, Brazil and Taiwan as countries that have outlawed the practice nationally. Further south, Connecticut has restored voting rights to people with past convictions, marking a milestone in the push to end criminal disenfranchisement, and in Montana, 18,000 acres of wildlife reserve, known as the National Bison Range, has been formally handed back to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes who will now manage it in perpetuity.
Bad news for fat cats, good news for everyone else, as the world's largest economies have taken a decisive step forward to make multinational companies pay their fair share, setting an international minimum corporate tax rate of at least 15%. In Iran, a set of reforms has been passed to ensure that proper schooling is made available to all migrants, including thousands of undocumented children, and in Europe, 33 cities have signed an International Alliance of Safe Harbours Agreement allowing them to take in more refugees rescued at sea, to distribute the load more evenly away from hotspots in the Mediterranean.
Finally, while it's not technically good news we thought we should still include the latest figures from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program on global conflict-related deaths during 2020. Although the numbers are down from their highs of the mid 2010s, and down significantly from a generation ago, there was a slight uptick in both global conflicts and battle deaths last year. A sobering reminder that progress is never a straight line.
Saving the world is cheaper than ruining it
Heralded as ‘a law of laws’, the EU has approved landmark legislation to enshrine greenhouse gas emissions targets into law, requiring a 55% reduction by 2030, net zero by 2050, and the creation of a carbon budget for 2030-2050 that meets climate goals. It's a very, very big deal. You can already see the ripples: Volkswagen immediately announced it would stop making combustion engines in Europe by 2035, and Ford and Volvo said they would start all-electric production in Europe by 2030.
Canada can see the writing on the wall too, announcing a ban on the sale of new fuel-burning cars and light-duty trucks from 2035, and Maine says it will no longer invest in companies with big oil and gas portfolios, making it the first state in the United States to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Perhaps they'd gotten wind of a recent survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas of oil and gas executives, which included this little gem:
We have relationships with approximately 400 institutional investors and close relationships with 100. Approximately one is willing to give new capital to oil and gas investment.
Ouch.
Or perhaps they've been paying attention to the latest projections by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics which say that wind turbine service technician and solar panel installer will be the country’s fastest and third fastest growing occupations in the next decade. Reminds us of this graph, which might be one of our favourites of the entire Trump era (still waiting for that NYT visit to 'Wind Country').
The world's industrialists and financiers can certainly smell the blood in the water. The Financial Times is reporting that the vast majority of new coal-power plants being planned around the world will not make back their upfront costs, including all of those under construction in China. Specifically, 92% of facilities proposed or under construction globally will now cost more to build than the future cash flow they will generate. Pipelines? More like pipe dreams.
Right on cue, China’s biggest bank has dumped a plan to finance a $3 billion coal-fired power plant in Zimbabwe, Japanese trading house Mitsui & Co has eagerly offloaded its investments into Indonesian coal, and South Korea's three big insurance companies will stop underwriting coal-power projects, thanks in part to some serious people power.
One of Malaysia's biggest banks RHB has announced a coal exit by 2022, in Bangladesh, regulators are scrapping plans for 10 coal-fired power plants in favour of renewable energy (that's another 8GW off the table), and North Macedonia and Montenegro have become the first countries in the Western Balkans to announce coal exits, saying they will close their plants by 2027 and 2035 respectively.
All that dirty energy is going to have to be replaced, which is why California just approved a massive 11.5GW of clean energy to replace gas and the state’s last nuclear power plant, and why fossil fuels billionaire and Asia's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is making 'a green pivot' with a $10.1 billion investment into clean energy over the next three years. “I envision a future when our country will be transformed from a large importer of fossil energy to a large exporter of clean solar energy solutions.” Sounds good to us.
Now, if someone could just tell Scotty From Marketing.
The only home we've ever known
The entire landmass of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, 3,800 km2 of pristine wilderness that you've definitely seen in a nature documentary, will be designated as a protected area, complementing an already existing 1.24 million km2 marine reserve.
In other conservation news, a vast area of breathtaking beauty ranging through Albania, North Macedonia and Kosovo is about to become a national park, creating one of the largest protected areas in Europe, and in the United Arab Emirates, the population of the endangered Arabian oryx has increased by 22% in four years thanks to a reintroduction program inside the country's largest nature reserve.
It's probably worth mentioning, for the second time in this newsletter, that in the last decade, an area larger than Russia has been added to the world as parks or conservation areas. To give that success a different perspective, of all the land ever protected and conserved by official action, 42% was in the last ten years. More than 17% of the world’s landmass is now protected from development.
Meanwhile, quiet, clean, and green are not words you would typically use to describe a construction site, but on one of the busiest streets in the heart of Oslo, there's something special going on: in a world-first, all the machinery used on site, excavators, diggers, and loaders, are now electric. In New Zealand single-use plastics will be phased out by 2025, with bans on cotton buds, packaging, cutlery, straws, and fruit labels beginning next year - measures that could remove over 2 billion single-use items from landfill each year.
Along with those carrots, there's also a new stick, with ‘ecocide’ on its way to becoming the fifth crime at the International Criminal Court. Big polluters and many political leaders will be sleeping a little more uneasily after a six month deliberation by a team of international lawyers unveiled the new definition which ranks ‘attacks on nature’ on par with war crimes.
Ecocide
Unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.
Indistinguishable from magic
Here's something you don't see every day - a dual-mode flying car. This one just completed the first ever inter-city trip between two airports in Slovakia. After landing, the plane transforms in under three minutes into a sports car (I think I might have drawn this exact thing when I was six - Gus).
It’s an almost universal feeling: the thrill of hearing a mysterious new bird song, usually followed by a question: What was that bird? The question just got much easier to answer, with the release of a new AI-powered app that can identify 400 species from North America. Merlin
Using a not-dissimilar kind of technology, a simple blood test that can detect more than 50 types of cancer has been shown to be accurate enough to be used as a screening tool for over 50s. Britain's NHS will begin a pilot scheme of the test with 140,000 people this year. If it achieves the same kind of results, then this test will be used for millions of patients by 2025.
A startup co-founded by Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna has successfully used CRISPR to treat patients for transthyretin amyloidosis, a devastating disease in which a build-up of a protein affects a patient’s heart and nervous system. It's the first time ever that the gene-editing technology has been injected straight into the patient's bloodstream and successfully found its way to the problem, opening the door for a much wider range of treatments. NPR
In Israel, the world’s first industrial cultured meat facility has opened, capable of producing 500 kilograms of slaughter-free meat per day. It's a big step forward on the road to making scalable cell-based meat production a reality. New Atlas
A Swiss company has unveiled a revolutionary machine capable of growing new skin for burn patients. Using a small sample of healthy skin, cells are grown in a laboratory and then combined with a hydrogel to produce large quantities of new skin. The result, denovoSkin, is one millimetre thick, the same as the average natural dermis and epidermis. A sample the size of a stamp can end up as a piece almost the size of a place mat. “It’s not artificial skin, but it’s not exactly natural skin either.”
Medicine Sans Frontiers have turned to additive manufacturing at their Gaza offices, to print face masks designed to speed up healing and reduce scarring. The masks are part of a larger program which provides 3D printed masks and prosthetics to burn patients, and so far has treated more than 100 people from Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Jordan and Haiti. AFP
The information superhighway is still awesome
This is the best written, most detailed, and most compelling account we've come across of what ketamine treatment for PTSD feels like, by the executive editor of Popular Science, Rachel Feltman. "I experience a mental quiet I have never known before. I’m able to have one single thought at a time. I luxuriate over each notion like it’s a piece of chocolate melting in my mouth. I am achingly kind to myself in these moments, and I ache to be so kind to myself at all times."
Ezra Klein sat down with a technologist, a policymaker, a professor and a novelist to talk about climate change and democracy, and the result is an unusually lucid and nuanced conversation about where things might be headed. Come for the KSR, stay for some very careful tiptoeing around geoengineering. NYT
Business journalism and comics aren't exactly natural bedfellows, but that's what makes this 'article' all the more fun. It's the story of how Turkish thieves stole $40 million of copper by spray-painting rocks, which already gives you a pretty compelling headline, and that's before you get to the illustrations. To The Internet - more of this kind of thing please.
Or this, a crushing meditation on identity and desire by a lonely mother, and even this, an all too familiar memory, years later, of what searing teenage embarrassment feels like.
Kevin Maguire is doing such a good job over at the New Fatherhood, it feels like he's really plugging a big hole in online conversations around parenting. In this post he explores the search for purpose that confronts so many new dads, and ends up stuck "in between two mountains" but perhaps, finally with a pathway out.
Breathtaking, in so many senses of the word. One of the world's best freedivers, Toulouse Néry, and his wife, Julie Gautier, created this masterpiece in 2019. We guarantee it's one of the most amazing things you will ever watch, an underwater journey "in the space between two breaths." Stick with it for the sound of cracking ice sheets, and the sleeping sperm whales. Humans are amazing.
Humankind
Meet Nancy Hernandez, a 60 year old survivor of human trafficking in Tampa, who has transformed her trauma into a mission to help survivors of abuse create a better life for themselves and their families.
Born in Puerto Rico to a poor and dysfunctional family, Nancy was 18 when she visited New York and met an older man who promised her the American Dream. Her dream spiralled into a nightmare when Nancy’s new husband pimped her out to drug dealers and forced her to traffic drugs inside her body around the world. For 27 years Nancy endured daily abuse without any hope of release.
Her escape came by chance when her husband was killed in a car accident on New Year’s Eve in 2006. Nancy was 45 years old and finally in control of her life, “it was a new beginning, at a time when I thought I couldn’t change anything.” But she was dealt another blow, a cancer diagnosis attributed to the harsh chemicals her body had endured. Not one to throw away her second chance, Nancy survived her cancer battle, found God and returned to the streets of Tampa with a single purpose - to give other survivors the help that she spent years searching for.
Nancy’s mission started small, collecting donations to buy food. Every day she walked down Nebraska Avenue, handing out sandwiches and water to survivors of abuse and listening to their stories. Driven by faith and grit, Nancy created a network of support and helped women find homes, food and health assistance. In 2014 Nancy formalized her charitable acts into a non-profit Mujeres Restauradas por Dios, ‘Women Restored by God’.
The organisation opened its first brick-and-mortar location last month, on Nebraska Avenue, not far from where Nancy started handing out sandwiches 14 years ago. Her network includes 43 organizations that help survivors navigate everything from insurance and mental health to financial assistance. Mujeres Restauradas por Dios also played a key role in finding services for people evacuated from Puerto Rico after the devastation of hurricanes Irma and Maria, and has provided 1.5 million pounds of food to over 7,000 families during the pandemic. There's always food and a toiletries pantry on site.
Today she's heralded as a local hero in Tampa, but she’s never forgotten what it feels like to be powerless. Her message to survivors is clear and powered by hope and solidarity - “You can get out of there. You are not alone. This woman is here for you. This woman is here to help you.”
We're all done here, thanks for reading. We'll see you next week. Go watch that freediving video with headphones on and the sound turned way up. It'll help, we promise.
Much love,
Gus, Amy and the rest of the FC team
