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From the GNR Newsroom: Its the Monday Good News Roundup [1]
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Date: 2022-09-19
Alright, time once again for the Monday Good News Roundup. I got a lot of stories this week so lets cut the preamble and get right into the action. Once again thanks to my newsroom of Killer300 and Bhu for putting in the work getting all these stories for me.
Since 2008, CNU has been publishing the biannual Freeways Without Futures report. The report highlights the efforts of local campaign organizers and activists seeking to revitalize their communities by dismantling the city highways that burden them with the significant health hazards of vehicle exhaust, a loss of local businesses and services, and streets that are hostile to pedestrians. In total, local campaigns have nominated a total of 34 freeways for removal with 20 freeways nominated more than once. Here are updates on some of our most nominated freeways:
Every day, cars become more and more irrelevant to life, its time to make a change to the world for the better and take back the streets. Literally.
An ongoing challenge for us activist organizers is that the route to winning takes people out of their comfort zones. The positive side is not only that the campaign gets a chance to win, but also that enduring discomfort usually strengthens people — it puts them in touch with their power.
Sports trainers know this just as well as social change organizers do. The question for all of us is: How do we persuade people to tolerate it?
Never be afraid to tackle the unfamiliar, especially if its for a good cause.
WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, today extended his congratulations to the Republic of Togo, as it was confirmed that the West African country had become the first country to eliminate four devastating neglected tropical diseases. The ceremony took place during the 72nd Session of the World Health Organization Regional Committee for Africa, in Lomé, and was attended by Togo’s President Faure Gnassingbé.
Way to go for the people of Togo. Give those diseases the what for
New Delhi: As the countdown to India celebrating 75 glorious years of independence draws closer the remarkable journey is a constant reminder of the fact that the country has come a long way. Having eradicated two deadly pandemics – polio, and smallpox , the booming economy has improved tremendously concerning life expectancy. The average life of an Indian in 1947 was around 32 years and now it has increased to 70 years. The enormous rise in expectancy in the last more than seven decades has been over 100 per cent. India has also earned global respect and praise for its complete eradication of Poliovirus which rendered millions of children paralysed. The last case of polio was registered in 2010 in West Bengal, and the WHO declared the country polio-free in 2014. Till the 1990s polio was hyperendemic with an average of 1000 children getting affected by the virus daily. Smallpox has also been eliminated in India and around the world, after one last outbreak in Somalia in the late 1980s.
India is kicking ass on the fighting diseases front as well. Awesome to hear.
Being gay, bisexual or transgender should not be considered an illness and cannot be treated, the Vietnam government has announced in “a huge paradigm shift” in LGBTQ+ rights in the country. The Ministry of Health said medical professionals should treat LGBTQ+ people with respect and ensure they are not discriminated against. In an announcement sent to provincial and municipal health departments earlier this month, and posted on the government website, the ministry said being LGBTQ+ “is entirely not an illness” so it “cannot be ‘cured’ nor need[s] to be ‘cured’ and cannot be converted in any way”.
And the world becomes a little more tolerant today. Thank you Vietnam, and here’s hoping other countries follow suit.
Voters have grown more supportive of legalizing abortion following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, with a clear majority opposing restrictions, like bans at a certain point of pregnancy or barring women from traveling to get a legal abortion, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll that underscores the importance of the issue in the midterm elections According to the survey, 60% of voters said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 55% in March. Another 29% said it should be illegal, except in cases of rape, incest and when the woman’s life is endangered, compared with 30% in March. And 6% said it should be illegal in all cases, down from 11% in March.
*Don’t know what you’ve got till its gone intensifies*. Yeah this is the issue that’s gonna win us big in November.
Ambitious schemes by farmers and landowners to restore nature and reduce flooding while still producing food will be supported by the government in 22 locations across England. The landscape recovery scheme is being hailed by land managers and conservationists as the most “exciting and important” step in a generation to restore lost biodiversity. Projects include recreating water meadows in the Cotswolds, reviving eel-rich waterways in the Severn Valley, and restoring Enfield Chase on the edge of London.
Things have been rough in England lately so any good news from them is most welcome.
Renewable energy rose to make up nearly one-fourth of the electricity generated in the United States in the second quarter this year, while coal generation declined. The changing sources for our electricity are happening as the West deals with a years-long drought and sweats through a late summer heatwave—events that underscore why we need an energy transition to respond to climate change, and also how climate change is increasing the challenge of managing the system through the transition. Renewables’ 24.8 percent share of generation is a new high, but as I’ve said here many times, records are to be expected during an energy transition. The latest figures are from the Energy Information Administration. “We’re heading in the right direction,” said Joshua Rhodes, an energy systems research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin.
A quarter of US power is renewables. That is definitely cause for celebration, but we have to do more.
The new analysis for Carbon Brief, based on official figures and commercial data, shows China’s emissions have now fallen year-on-year for four consecutive quarters, extending what was already the longest sustained decline in recent history. The latest quarterly decline was driven by China’s ongoing real-estate slump, strict Covid control measures, weak growth in electricity demand and strong growth in renewable output. China’s coal-fired power generation declined by 4% year-on-year in the first half of 2022, but saw an increase in July and August, due to record-breaking heatwaves and droughts in a large part of the country. This has not changed the more salient drivers of falling emissions.
China is doing better as well it seems. Hopefully we can keep that trend going.
California took some of its most aggressive steps yet to fight global warming as lawmakers passed a flurry of new climate bills late Wednesday, including a record $54 billion in climate spending, a measure to prevent the state’s last nuclear power plant from closing, sharp new restrictions on oil and gas drilling and a mandate that California stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2045.
California is getting serious about climate change, Hopefully everyone else follows suit.
There were three big bills in the legislature this session sponsored by YIMBYs: upzoning commercial corridors (AB 2011), eliminating parking requirements for new homes near transit (AB 2097) and establishing a social housing public developer (AB 2053). AB 2053 died in committee, but the other two made it. The biggest of them all is AB 2011 which will upzone up to 2.4 million more homes along commercial roads.
Making it easier for people to get affordable housing in California. Now in New York please!
Recent polls have revealed that “threats to democracy” are a top priority for many of us living in the United States. On the one hand, this is good news. Acknowledging the dangerous path we are on will hopefully galvanize more people to get involved in our shared civic life. The bad news is that Americans have wildly divergent understandings of where the threats to democracy are coming from, who is responsible and the solutions needed. Democracy has become a partisan issue, more and more politicized in today’s toxically polarized environment. While it is a foundational ideal and the system of government on which our country was supposedly based, the loud cries to “protect democracy” are increasingly divisive and seen as weaponized for political gain. For example, Biden gave a prime-time “democracy in crisis” speech that has received critiques for being overly divisive. By squarely naming the “MAGA faction” as the biggest threat to democracy, the argument is that the president missed the opportunity to separate the specific anti-democratic behaviors of political leaders (and the systemic actors that support them) from the broad mix of everyday citizens who may have voted for former President Donald Trump. They may be left wondering where they fit in the democratic future Biden says he wants to build. MAGA Republican politicians on the other hand have made very clear who does not belong in their vision of America by enflaming racial grievances and stoking fear of LGBTQ populations to dangerous effect.
Our enemies want us divided, we need to come together in order to help save our democracy.
n 2015, almost 200 countries got together and agreed to 17 goals for improving life on Earth. These Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) cover everything from climate action to eliminating hunger, with 2030 set as the target year for meeting them. This Tuesday, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released its annual report on how the world is doing when it comes to the SDGs.
The bad news: Forecasting 15 years into the future, no one expected a worldwide pandemic or a war in Ukraine that would threaten food stability in Africa. These events have caused real setbacks in our progress toward the SDGs. The good news: Tracking across the past 30 years, we have still improved when it comes to almost every goal.
For example, with the exception of the last bullet point below, which includes data from the last decade only, these are some of the changes we have made since 1990: The share of the global population with access to clean water and sanitation has increased by 100 percent.
Children under five are now around 30 percent less likely to be stunted or malnourished.
Maternal deaths per 100,000 live births have declined by 40 percent.
The prevalence of 15 neglected tropical diseases, like dengue and leprosy, has declined by more than 70 percent.
76 percent of adults worldwide now own a financial account, up from 51 percent a decade ago. (In developing countries, 71 percent of adults now own a financial account, representing a 30-percentage point increase over the last decade.) As journalist Derek Thompson put it in an Atlantic piece about the report, “it is hard to argue that human progress is some sort of sales pitch from the pathologically optimistic. Progress is simply a fact.”
Its like the song says, its getting better all the time (But you know not ironically).
COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina senators rejected a ban on almost all abortions Thursday in a special session called in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade after five Republicans, including all the chamber’s women, refused to support it. The 30 Republicans in the 46-member chamber had a majority to pass the ban, but did not have the extra votes to end a threatened filibuster by Republican Sen. Tom Davis. Davis, the chief of staff for former Gov. Mark Sanford before being elected to the Senate in 2009, was joined by the three Republican women in the Senate, a fifth GOP colleague and all Democratic senators to oppose the proposed ban.
They can’t even sell an abortion ban in South Carolina of all places. Lets face facts, the GOP done fucked up big time. We are not going back.
BRUSSELS -- The European Union unveiled plans Wednesday to ban products made with forced labor, in an effort to crack down on a modern-day form of slavery that a U.N. agency estimated affects more than 27 million people worldwide. The European Commission, which proposes EU laws, said the policy would remove from the 27-nation bloc’s markets all products made with forced labor. It would also stop them from being made in the world’s biggest trading bloc or shipped through it. The move does not target specific companies, industries or countries. “Our aim is to eliminate all products made with forced labor from the EU market, irrespective of where they have been made. Our ban will apply to domestic products, exports and imports alike,” commission Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis said.
This is great news, hopefully we can get something like this in place over here someday.
I think that does well for the Good News Roundup this week. I hope you found these stories uplifting, I certainly enjoyed providing them to you. Have a good week all.
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