The Progress Report: Construction: It’s Electric!

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Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by my cohost, Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of the Progress Network, and this is our shorter form Progress Report, which we do weekly where Emma and her team at the Progress Network scour the known universe for stories that point upward rather than news that draws us downward.

Stories about things that are going right in a world where there is so much evidently going wrong. But of course, the news being the news, it is usually only about things going wrong, and not, as we are pointing out, about the many things that are going right at any given time, somewhere on the great planet Earth.

So, Emma. What have you found for us this week? 

Emma Varvaloucas: We are going to start with a throwback to COVID. I’m sure that it’s something that everyone would love to forget, but we are going back briefly to talk about a development for people with long COVID who are still out there, still struggling with long term effects of having caught the coronavirus.

One of those effects being a loss of their sense of smell and taste. And there are treatments that work for this, steroids, something called smell training, but it doesn’t work for everybody. So, The Guardian has published an article this week about doctors in London who have successfully restored patients’ sense of smell and taste through nasal surgery.

It’s a nasal surgery that they usually use to fix the deviated septum. It essentially expands your nasal passageways. They have cured or significantly restored a sense of taste and smell for about a dozen patients with long COVID. It’s pretty cool. They basically find that by enlarging the nasal passages, more of the scent reaches the top of the nasal passageway where it needs to go to get picked up.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I still run into people as I’m sure everyone does who say, yeah, ever since I had COVID, I, you know, don’t smell lost some taste. It’s really interesting. Like there’s a lot of people out there, many of whom don’t. You know, lead with it because it seems like a small thing. Of course, it’s not such a small thing, particularly if you can’t taste your food.

So there’s a lot of people who have this after effect of COVID, even now, even if they had COVID a year ago or a year and a half ago, so it’s definitely better if there was some way to deal with it rather than doctors saying, as they have tended to say, it’ll come back. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Sorry, can’t do nothing for you. Now what they can do for you is called a functional septorhinoplasty.

So you can get a nose job. Let’s move on to Lenacapavir, which I know for sure that we have spoken about in the newsletter, and I cannot remember if we’ve talked about it on the podcast. Do you remember, Zachary? 

Zachary Karabell: No, not at all. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t mentioned it on the podcast. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Essentially, the big game changer around HIV prevention was PrEP, which is a daily pill that came out a number of years ago.

And since then, we have been limited to PrEP, which PrEP is amazing. But the downfall to PrEP is that you must take a pill every day, and of course if you forget to take a pill or something happens, your barrier protection against HIV can falter. So last year, the pharmaceutical company Gilead came out with data about a twice yearly injection called Lenacapavir that was shown to be essentially 100 percent effective at preventing HIV.

And the magic of that is that it’s only needed to be done Every six months much easier adherence for people that are going to be using this this drug That was enough of a breakthrough and a game changer in and of itself But Gilead has come out with new data this week that they believe that Lenacapavir can potentially Do the same amount of work that the twice yearly injection was doing only once a year, which would be huge news.

We are far away from, you know, Lenacapivir even being available to the richest countries, much less Lenacapivir being available to people in poor countries. Even this new news about the data saying that there’s a potential that it could only be needed once a year is not confirmed yet. So we’re in the early stages of this, but still it’s very, very, very encouraging news.

Zachary Karabell: So this is not yet FDA approval trials pricing. This is just on the horizon of. The next thing coming down the proverbial pharmaceutical pike is a reduction in having to take PrEP and a more permanent or long lasting solution. 

Emma Varvaloucas: So the FDA is reviewing Lenacapavir now, so it is probably going to gain I mean, okay, you never know what’s going to happen, but it’s probably going to gain FDA approval relatively soon.

And then of course, there’s a long road between people, the United States getting it versus people everywhere getting it in the FDA pipeline. So it’s not like it’s completely out there on the horizon. It is moving, but definitely not something that you’re going to be able to go get, you know, tomorrow or the next month, or maybe even the next six months to a year.

Zachary Karabell: So we’ve gone from smell To HIV, to what? 

Emma Varvaloucas: Electrifying the construction industry. Which is not somewhere people thought we were probably about to go. Bloomberg had a great article this week about Oslo. In Norway, they are making a big push to electrify all of the municipal construction sites. in Oslo.

They’re at about 85 percent right now, aiming to get to 100 percent by the end of this year. This might seem like one of those things where it’s like, Oh, like the far off lands in, in Norway, Northern Europe doing stuff that Americans can never dream of. But I was inspired by some of the quotes from Oslo’s vice mayor who was saying, Hey, you know, we thought this transition was going to be kind of difficult, but actually.

It has been a lot smoother than expected, in particular because the electrification of the construction industry ends up being a less polarizing conversation than the conversation around electric vehicles because the benefits are so immediate and so felt. So if you’re sitting at a restaurant across the street from a construction site and it’s essentially noiseless or much down, you know, much, much lower down on the noise zone meter, people are like all for it.

You know, you’re not really asking anything of them. Of course, the kind of heavy machinery that’s used at construction sites that’s in its infancy insofar as converting all those machines to electric options. But the process has started, China is interested, and hopefully an electrified construction site is coming to New York streets and other city streets in the not too distant future.

Zachary Karabell: So that requires, like, electric generators? Do you know how this actually works? What does it mean to electrify? It just means you don’t have a huge diesel generator or whatever

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah I mean, it’s like the actual machines themselves it’s like instead of having an electric vehicle a car that you drive around you have like an electric heavy machinery rotor.

They’re kind of like this. I need to look up the names of the actual machinery they use at construction sites, people listening and know more about construction than I are gonna say god this girl doesn’t know anything about construction heavy machinery. Well, we’re talking about electrifying construction sites.

We’re talking about electrifying the actual heavy machinery themselves. So equipment for moving earth, you know, like those big, it’s not a tractor, but those things that excavate, you know, large piles of dirt and move it around. Things like pavers, heavy transport equipment, things like that. Just how an electric vehicle, a car you drive would have a battery, these machines would be electrified.

So exactly the same principle. 

Zachary Karabell: And yes, as we’ve said multiple times on this podcast, lessons from Scandinavia, while they are often illuminating and inspiring, need to be not taken with a grain of salt, but the awareness of these are incredibly wealthy, ethnically homogeneous countries that have kind of a communal attitude toward collective problem solving in a way that is hard to apply to the United States or hard to apply to most other countries.

And in the case of Norway in particular, they have a trillion dollar plus sovereign wealth fund because of oil reserves. I still find it. I don’t think ironic is the word, but it’s interesting. The degree to which Norway has moved on a sustainable renewables path, much of that fueled pun intended by a sovereign wealth fund that is based on petroleum.

So you have this radical move towards sustainable practices. Facilitated largely by unsustainable carbon fuel. I’m not saying that’s hypocritical. I’m just saying that it’s an odd sui generis that is not easily replicable. I mean, you have a lot of talk in the Emirates and places like Qatar and the UAE, where they occasionally muse even Saudi Arabia about a post petroleum future and thinking about what that would look like and investing in renewables and investing in sustainability.

And they’re able to do so because of their vast oil reserves. So I’m not trying to rain on Oslo’s parade. I’m just indicating they have certain advantages that are hard to apply elsewhere. 

Emma Varvaloucas: I think when people hear about the successes of Norway and other countries like Norway, it seems like a very far away thing for people in the States in particular.

Like, Oh, well, good for them, but we are not Norway. We are not rich with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We’re not homogenous. Everything that you said, but a lot of the stuff that happens in Norway does eventually. Make its way into other countries. I mean Norway is way ahead of the United States insofar as electric vehicle adoption but the United States is making inroads there, pun very much intended, just because they’re far ahead of us doesn’t mean that that’s not going to be achievable in the future.

I feel like we cannot end without mentioning that fantastic Will Ferrell commercial about catching up with Norway at the Super Bowl. Was that two or three years ago? 

Zachary Karabell: We will drop that in some progress network material so you can have a link to the Will Ferrell commercial. But that’s a good note to end it on.

I think it’s always a good note to end something on a Will Ferrell note. And we will be back with you next week. We will be back with you with our longer form. What could go right interview podcast, please send us your thoughts, send us news items that you think we should highlight stories of the world that point in a constructive direction.

We are all ears and we will certainly credit you if you send us a story that we think is incredible that we haven’t noticed. So please do that. So thank you for listening. And thank you Emma for co hosting. 

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks Zachary as always. And thanks to everybody.