There is evidence to suggest, according to this recent Bloomberg Green article as well as many other sources, that we may be hitting "peak meat." That is, the global production of animal proteins appears to be declining. It declined last year in 2019 and that was only the second time since 1961 in which that happened. And this year, the same is projected to happen, which is supposedly unprecedented in modern times.

The big change is that people are eating a lot less beef. In fact, per capita beef production peaked way back in the 1970s and has been slowing declining ever since. The growth over the years has really been coming from chicken. In 1961, 39% of all meat production was beef. As of 2018, that number had declined to 20%. Pork as a percentage of all production has remained more or less consistent. But chicken has basically tripled from 11% to 34%.

From an environmental and climate change standpoint, this is a very good thing. As most of you know, greenhouse gas emissions from the production of beef are vastly higher (about 10x) than for pork and chicken. Chicken is the lowest (see above). At the same time, big bets are being made that this growing love of chicken isn't enough. In the first 7 months of 2020, over $1.4 billion of venture capital was raised for "faux meat" startups (source). This is already a significant increase compared to 2019.

This money is expecting the future of meat to be plant-based and cell-based.

All charts from Bloomberg Green.

I installed and setup Health Canada's COVID Alert app this morning.

It's really simple to do that. You don't enter any personal information. You just select which province you're in, agree to let it use your Bluetooth, and give it permission to share the random codes that you collect with its servers (more on this below). The app is then active and working. But to be clear, it doesn't collect your location (it doesn't use GPS or location services). It doesn't collect the places or times that you are next to someone who also has the COVID Alert app. And it doesn't know if you're with someone who was previously diagnosed with COVID-19.

Built on top of the private exposure framework that was collectively developed by Apple and Google, the app works by using Bluetooth to exchange "random codes" between nearby phones that have the app. These are anonymous and random codes that are used to track which phones have been next to which phones for any meaningful period of time. The app also uses Bluetooth signal strength to estimate proximity. So it knows how long your phone has been proximate to someone else's (with the app) and how close they got to each other.

That's pretty much all that happens with the app unless you test positive for COVID-19. At that point, you will be given a one-time key along with your diagnosis. The onus is then on you to anonymously self-report on the app. Once you do that, anyone who was exposed -- i.e. next to your phone in the last 14 days -- will receive an alert on their phone via the app. And since the app doesn't know any names or who anybody is, it's of course all completely anonymous.

It's great to see all of this coming together. The private sector worked to build the underlying framework and now you have government building on top of it to deliver public health tools. I know that some or many of you will be concerned about privacy, but that appears to have been very well thought out. If you haven't already downloaded the app, I would encourage you to check it out. It's available for iOS and Android and can be downloaded over here.

I posted this chart on Twitter last night. It's from the WSJ showing new weekly confirmed COVID-19 cases in Florida, New York, and the U.S. as a whole. Now, the first thing I will say is that I relinquished my hopes of becoming an amateur epidemiologist back in April. I have no idea how this is all going to play out. But as an urbanist, it is interesting to note that back in April, many believed that New York City's urban density was a real problem and the almost singular cause of its high number of cases (despite many other big and dense cities around the world doing much better). There was also a belief (or hope) that warmer temperatures might have a positive impact on transmission rates. That's maybe why Florida was doing relatively better. But things have flipped. Cases in Florida are up and California just surpassed NY for the US state with the most number of cases. So who knows what will happen next. But what I do know is that wearing a mask isn't a big deal (I have mine with me all the time) and that big urban centers will be just fine. City Observatory recently published apartment search data suggesting that dense cities have actually been getting more, rather than less, attention in the wake of COVID. That doesn't surprise me.