The Progress Report: Advancements and Deposits

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Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. And this is the adjunct to our longer form podcast, also called, conveniently or confusingly enough, What Could Go Right? Which is also paired with our weekly newsletter called, conveniently enough, or confusingly enough, What Could Go Right?,

which you can get at theprogressnetwork.org. And this is our weekly progress report where we highlight some news of the week, or rather just news that is out there that we are highlighting this week, about things that have gone right in a world where so much is evidently and obviously going wrong. So, on that note, we will turn to Ms.Varvaloucas. and her magical hat, not a sorting hat, but a magical hat of good stories. So what are you going to reach into and bring out for us today?

Emma Varvaloucas: I just want to say like, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff. That’s my immediate reaction to that. No, actually, I’m going to

Zachary Karabell: So thank you for joining us today. We, that is it for our our week of news.

We’re going to leave you with Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Yes, exactly. So actually I wanted to start by talking about the election. Something good about the election. Shocker, shocker, I know.

Zachary Karabell: Gasp.

Emma Varvaloucas: So Well, I should say, by the way, that I’ve been designated by the government as a special federal voter. I filled out my ballot day abroad, and in case anyone was wondering, voting from abroad is not that easy.

Zachary Karabell: What is a special federal?

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, because I vote from abroad, I can’t vote in like, I’m not eligible to vote for all of the elections in the United States with my New York address. But I can vote for, like, the House. president. So I filled out that ballot today. And I’m, they call you a special federal voter.

What district?

Zachary Karabell: But you vote for the house based on your last permanent residency?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yes. There’s actually some confusion for me on that because unclear to me, you’re supposed to vote based on your last permanent residency or like the last place you voted or where I’ve been filing my taxes for the last four years.

So I requested a ballot from both places and filled out the ballot that came. I’m not actually sure if I did that correctly or not, but anyway, this is a digression from the good news.

Emma Varvaloucas:This is just personal stories about my life.

Anyway, if Donald Trump loses, is he going to create a post election chaos?

Are we going to have a repeat of January 6th, you know, January 6th, 2025? Is he going to push people to not certify the election results? And I think it’s actually. Not that well known, and I appreciated this article in Semaphore today today being a few days before this episode. Is being listened to on Friday, the 25th of October, that there was a bipartisan law passed in 2022 that made it harder for Donald Trump to pull something like that ever again.

So previously you only needed one senator and one house member to object to any state’s presidential results and force a vote. Now because of this new law. The objection threshold is much higher. You need 20 senators and 87 House members, so one fifth of each chamber. So essentially, even if Donald Trump loses if he’s trying to sow chaos, he’s going to have to pull a significant amount of the House and the Senate to go along with him for that, and it’s just very, very unlikely that that could happen.

The law also made sure to clarify that the vice president’s role in all of this is only symbolic. So I’m not really sure how many people are really aware of that, like there really were things that were put into place post 2020 election that is hopefully going to end up with a smooth result this time around despite the fact that we do have Trump running once again.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, this is, I think it was called the Electoral Count Act, right?

Emma Varvaloucas: That’s a good question. And.

Zachary Karabell: It tried to address some of the issues that arose in the weeks before January 6th. Not to, not to dampen that. Mm-Hmm. . I mean it was good. And this was a bill that actually Mitch McConnell championed one of his last acts as Senate Majority Leader.

You could imagine 87 house Republicans. Very easily challenging just a few states.

Emma Varvaloucas: Really. That would be enough. I don’t think so. I think even 87. If Trump loses though. Maybe. I mean like consider like they would Yeah. Wanna pull him through. You think there are 87? Republican House members that would do that?

Zachary Karabell: I do.

Emma Varvaloucas: And 20 senators?

Zachary Karabell: I guess we’ll find out. 20 senators is going to be a much harder threshold. That’s gonna be a much better one. Definitely. Yeah.

Emma Varvaloucas: Alright.

Zachary Karabell: But it was a good act and it was a, it was a, a corrective to some of the, to sort of unexamined structural issues that no one had taken advantage of.

Mm-Hmm. . But obviously we’re taken advantage of on January.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. Alright. So we’ll see.

Zachary Karabell: Guess, we’ll see how it goes. You see,

Emma Varvaloucas: Know that a lot of people are prepping for this election. that we rarely hear about. We hear a lot about the threats. We don’t hear a lot about the prep on the other end. Apparently Kamala Harris’s team has hundreds of lawyers preparing for any eventuality.

So

Zachary Karabell: yes,

Emma Varvaloucas: we shall see soon. So let’s move away from the election, which I think everyone will be happy to move away from it right now. Let’s talk about the world’s first mRNA vaccine for norovirus entering a phase 3 clinical trial. I don’t know if you’ve ever had norovirus, but I have, and I would have loved to have been vaccinated against it.

Oh, it’s terrible. It’s terrible. It’s kind of like the flu, but, but, but more. nausea oriented. It’s awful. So might be one of those diseases that are going to get an mRNA vaccine if this clinical trial is successful. We aren’t going to know for a while. It’s a two year clinical trial, but I do make a point to try to follow up on all of the mRNA based vaccines that have followed from the COVID one.

Zachary Karabell: And yeah, I mean, this is one of these things where obviously the COVID vaccine sort of alerted the world to mRNA as a technology that could develop, that could accelerate drug development. Obviously, there have been many people for years saying this and saying, Hey, wait a minute, we got this thing clearly.

It was never going to be confined to just a COVID vaccine and we are seeing time after time after time, disease after disease in the years since 2020 where mRNA technology has accelerated drug development. So this is just like one more, here you go, we’re in a new world of drug development and the timeframe is much narrower.

In fact, the only real bottleneck, maybe a legit one, maybe not, is the regulatory process, which, you know, legitimately wants to. Have serious scrutiny to see what side effects are, unexpected or unanticipated dangers, but The bottlenecks are less and less about the creation and development and more just about the licensing.

Emma Varvaloucas: I’m going to go do a quick tour back to the pandemic since we’re already there actually talking about the development of mRNA. This is a kind of a fun, wacky, peculiar, I don’t want to say silver lining, but COVID pandemic. So as I think people know, the flu shot every year, it’s against a bunch of different strains of the flu and Scientists essentially try to guess which strains are going to be active that year and they put those strains into the shot.

And this year when it came time to put together the annual flu shot, they realized that one strain, which is called Bee Yamagata, don’t ask me why, I don’t know has essentially gone extinct. And they think that it has gone extinct because of the COVID lockdowns. Like, because people were social distancing and masking so much, it was already in low circulation at that time, and that we essentially, you know, made it go away on our own, which is the first time, if this is all true, it would be the first documented time that we have eliminated flu strain through a change in human behavior, which is kind of wacky and wild and fun.

Yep.

Zachary Karabell: Although. That was partly because of the human behavior during lockdown. Oh, it was

Emma Varvaloucas: entirely to do with the human behavior during lockdowns. Yeah. It wasn’t like we got really good at social distancing for the flu or something like that. It was entirely because of COVID. But it is like one little wacky cool thing that came out of that whole terrible era.

Zachary Karabell: I was at a dinner the other night and people were You know, you knew this was going to happen. We’re nostalgizing that three, four month period from March of 2020 to the summer of 2020, where just the nature of everything shutting down meant more time with families, more time in communities, more, more connection, more slower paced.

And they were fondly looking back at that as a moment in time, which is fascinating, right? Because I don’t think anyone at the time felt fond. But the ability of humans to recast the past is extraordinary. Just saying to remember like how we experience what we are now experiencing will change over time as it recedes in the past.

Even Nixon is having a degree of like, yeah, you know, maybe it wasn’t so bad. So everything gets reframed.

Emma Varvaloucas: I have to say I was probably in the very small minority in the first lockdown. I was very fond about it. I had a great time. So, let’s move on to this announcement from ExxonMobil that they have found a Millions and millions and millions of tons.

So anywhere between 5 to 19 million, they aren’t sure. Tons of lithium in Arkansas. They say that it’s more than enough to meet all of the world’s demand for the metal, which of course is used in electric vehicles. Great news for the U. S. if they can figure out how to get it out of there in a cost effective way.

Kind of a great news for the clean energy transition, generally speaking. It is in brine water, so there’s already a process in place for extracting lithium from salty water. Chile does it a lot. They essentially just like leave it out to dry in these giant ponds. But what ExxonMobil is trying to do is develop a process for direct extraction, so you’re just going to take the lithium out without having to deal with the salty water around it.

So. Okay. Good news for Exxon Mobil. It’s not exactly what we want to cheer them on necessarily, but it’s also good that we’re finding more deposits of these critical minerals that we’re going to need more and more in the coming years.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. I mean, this is where, frankly, that some of the free marketer let’s lighten our regulatory load may have some of the better of the argument.

I know a lot of people will go, no, no, no, but I mean, the reality is if it takes 10 or 15 years to develop a mine because of A slew of environmental impact studies slash NIMBYism. Some of which probably should be done and are, have a place within a process, but greater good arguments also need to have a place within the process.

And, you know, we do are unfortunately somewhat hamstrung, particularly in the United States, by a nothing can do any harm, put anyone out of work, or threaten anything, or carry any risk. And those are unreasonable hurdles, particularly in the urgency of, look, if you think battery technology is the next wave that will lead to a lower carbon future, there are just certain physical materials you need to produce batteries.

You can’t just like, they don’t come out of thin air. And there may be trade offs there, but we don’t do a very good job right now of balancing those trade offs. Like, what’s the greater trade off, a 10 year environmental crisis? So, I think we need to think seriously about, you know, if every regulation is held up as sacrosanct then you’re not able to rank anything in terms of trade offs and greater goods.

So, we’ll see if this one, including what your point of like, let’s not root for Exxon Mobile. Wow. Hmm. Maybe we shouldn’t root for ExxonMobil doing certain types of heavy duty extractive of petroleum products, but maybe we should root for ExxonMobil if they’re the ones who are going to lead the charge for more lithium.

Like, somebody’s got to do it, right? You don’t always get to choose who.

Emma Varvaloucas: One thing that a lot of people know is that the extraction of minerals for the clean energy transition, there are a lot of labor rights concerns around those, so it’s nice to have a lithium deposit in the United States where you know that.

People’s labor rights are going to be much more taken care of than in a lot of other places around the world. So that’s point number one. Point number two, the method that Chile uses right now to dry out this lithium is sometimes is environmentally damaged to the freshwater around it. And ExxonMobil to their credit is trying to develop, like I said before, a direct extraction method, which is meant to be Less or perhaps not environmentally harmful at all.

So

Zachary Karabell: here’s the lithium. There you are.

Emma Varvaloucas: Here’s the lithium. So that’s what we got for today.

Zachary Karabell: That’s what we got. So thank you for listening. As always, please send us your news items that you want highlighted in the newsletter or discussed here. You never know. That could be something. We missed that is absolutely worth looking at.

We are totally open for those ideas. Send us your critiques, your comments, your thoughts, your ideas. You’re tired, you’re hungry, and we will do our best to respond. So thanks for listening. We’ll be back with you next week.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks, Zachary. Thanks, everybody.