The Tortoise Newslist

Openness is at the heart of our journalism. To keep you, our members, updated on the ideas we are pursuing, we’re publishing a weekly Newslist. It’s a feature of every newsroom (usually kept updated by a harried news editor, trying to keep pace with the day’s events) – but the Tortoise Newslist serves a different purpose: ours is an inventory of things to come, shaped by the conversations we’ve had with you, our members, at our ThinkIns.

Topics for discussion:

The politics of health

• Tory MPs are doing double duty as epidemiologists, tangling with the government and its health experts on what’s right for their constituents – and by extension the country.
• The beginning of the end of Trump’s response to Covid, and the start of Biden’s. What will be the difference? Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, will take it seriously and delegate less to states. Beyond that, it’s hard to say.
• Trauma and opioids. We revisited the overprescription of opioids in the UK last week and were confronted with the question: how many people taking them are coping with past trauma?

Brexit

• This really is crunch week.
• Is no deal more likely than we think?
• If so, what? A long-term 1.5 per cent hit to the economy. And apart from that?

CAP off
Goodbye CAP and cash subsidies for British landowners in proportion to their acreage. Hello new subsidies for “clean air, clean and plentiful water, thriving plants and wildlife, reduction in and protection from environmental hazards, mitigation of and adaptation to climate change [and] enhanced beauty, heritage and engagement with the environment”. What’s not to like?

Britain’s post-Brexit successor to the Common Agricultural Policy looks grand on paper. Can we afford it?

Quick thinking
Harnessing AI to model how proteins fold on the basis of their chemical formulae is going to change the world. We’re told. It sounds entirely plausible even though few non-specialists understand quite why. Suffice to say that proteins’ functions depend on their shapes, and hitherto modelling a single protein’s shape using old-fashioned techniques like crystallography has taken years. Thanks to Demis Hassabis and his Google-owned company DeepMind, it’ll now take days. This should radically speed up really complex drug development, including for cancer. It’s also a solution to a 50-year-old challenge and great timing for the Tortoise AI summit this Thursday. 

Cops on camera
France’s parliament has scrapped a proposed law that would have restricted rights to film police in action. The bill had provoked angry demonstrations by free speech and human rights activists, and will now be “completely rewritten”. But the impulse behind it won’t go away: Macron needs to find ways to steal the thunder of the far right before he stands for re-election in less than two years’ time. 

A slower spread?
When did Covid really start? There’s new evidence from blood samples sent to the Red Cross that the virus was circulating on the US West Coast in mid-December last year, a month before the first confirmed US case. If so, is it the case that Covid-19 outbreaks generally start more slowly than we thought, spreading undetected with very low prevalence until exponential increases in case numbers begin, by which time they’re impossible to contain? This is interesting not least because (see discussion topics above) it’s political. A lot of people on both sides of the Atlantic still argue that high numbers of undetected asymptomatic cases mean real infection and death rates are higher and lower respectively than official figures indicate. The WSJ reports ($) that new modelling by the Centers for Disease Control lends some credence to this view. NB though, it’s only modelling.  

Past the peak
Remember peak oil? It was briefly a cool idea, then it was cool to sneer at. And now? It’s back! So back! Bloomberg Green says it’s “suddenly upon us”. Exhibit A in this analysis is BP’s 2020 outlook, which reckoned net oil demand peaked last year and won’t surpass that level even in a business as usual scenario as the world emerges from Covid. In this scenario oil demand falls slowly between now and 2040. In BP’s two other scenarios – assuming rapid and net zero (ie very rapid) CO2 emissions reductions – it falls fast. Unlike BP, Exxon remains unapologetically an oil and gas specialist, but it too is having a rethink, cutting staff and investment in new production and lowering its forecast for future oil prices for the next seven years. Hmm. When oil’s cheap, don’t people tend to buy it?

If you’d like to join the conversations happening in our newsroom, you can attend a ThinkIn – one of our open editorial meetings. More information here.