Tag Archives: good news

There’s Good News Too..

Yes, things are bad. Yes, we are facing a not-so-slow-rolling coup. Yes, we are being governed by unprincipled and profoundly ignorant people. Yes, Trump’s horrific bill narrowly passed the Senate. But if we look, there’s also evidence that good people–good citizens–are fighting back. Effectively.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Americans of Conscience transmitted a long list of positive news items, “wins” for democracy, including everything from a town council in Barrington, Rhode Island unanimously voting to declare their town a sanctuary  for transgender people, to Tulsa, OKlahoma’s announcement of a $105 million reparations package for the 1921 Tulsa massacre, to the thousands of people in Los Angeles, New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Charlotte, San Diego, Boston, Houston, San Antonio, Minneapolis, Worcester, MA, and elsewhere showing up to support neighbors facing unjust ICE raids, detainment, and deportation, to the successful EarthJustice lawsuit requiring the USDA to restore deleted information about climate change from the government website.

There were dozens more.

Then there was the welcome news that the Senate Parliamentarian had tossed numerous provisions of the “Big Beautiful Bill” for violating the Byrd rule limiting what can be included in reconciliation bills. Among the provisions that were deleted:

A provision selling off millions of acres of federal lands
A provision to pass food aid costs on to states
A proposed limitations on food aid benefits to certain citizens or lawful permanent residents
Proposed restrictions on the ability of federal courts to issue nationwide injunctions and temporary restraining orders
A proposal for a funding cap for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and for slashing pay of employees at the Federal Reserve
A proposal to slash $293 million from the Treasury Department’s Office ofFinancial Research
A plan to dissolve the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board
An effort to repeal an EPA rule limiting air pollution emissions of passenger vehicles
An item allowing project developers to bypass judicial environmental reviews if they pay a fee
A measure deeming offshore oil and gas projects automatically compliant with the National Environmental Policy Act
A modified version of the REINS Act, which would increase congressional power to overturn major regulations
A scheme to punish so-called sanctuary cities by withholding federal grants
An increase on Federal Employees Retirement System contribution rate for new civil servants who refuse to become at-will employees
A measure seeking to extend the suspension of permanent price supportauthority for farmers
A requirement forcing sale of all the electric vehicles used by the Post Office
A change to annual geothermal lease sales and to geothermal royalties, June 24)
A proposal for a mining road in Alaska
Authorization for the executive branch to reorganize federal agencies
New fee for federal worker unions’ use of agency resources
Transfer of space shuttle to a nonprofit in Houston from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum

And that is only a partial list. The ruling deleted at least some elements of this obscene effort to rob the poor to further enrich the plutocrats–at least from the Senate version.

As Simon Rosenberg recently reminded readers of his “Hopium Chronicles,” Trump is struggling and unpopular. Despite his efforts to wag the dog, his poll numbers have steadily dropped. Overall, his approval is down 20 points from week one, but perhaps more significant is the evidence that his incursions into the Black, Latino and youth votes are dissipating. In week one, 29% of Black voters approved of him; that number is now 12%. Hispanic approval has fallen from 42% to 30%. And the  approval of those between the ages of 18 and 29 has gone from 48% to 28%.

Rosenberg credits the thousands of grassroots groups that have emerged across the country, and the creation of 
new media organizations like Meidas Touch and COURIER Newsroom. (He also notes that Substack is becoming a powerful new platform for our politics–part of the way that news and media consumption habits have changed in the past year.) 

We’ve also seen the emergence of an entire new network of pro-democracy legal organizations, focused on defense of the Constitutional order, and increased pro-democracy activism by the nation’s 23 Democratic Attorney Generals.

New leaders are emerging, rising to the moment, breaking though (Newsom, Pritzker, Crockett, Murphy, Frost, AOC, Booker, Slotkin, Mamdani, etc)

We are communicating who we are right now through our opposition to Trump and our work to prevent his assault on the middle class, weakening of our health care system and abandonment of the Constitutional order. I think these fights are helping connect us to the core of who we are – champions of every day Americans, proud patriots who love this country and are willing to fight for it.

The good news is that good Americans are making what John Lewis called “Good Trouble.”
 

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And Now For Something Cool…

As the hysteria over the belief that pot was a “gateway” drug finally began to abate, and states slowly moved to legalize its medical and recreational uses, discussions about the benefits of marijuana have tended to focus on CBD and similar semi-medicinal uses. But the real benefit of a more sane approach to the plant is in the rediscovery of the multiple uses of hemp.

As Wikipedia reports, industrial hemp– a botanical class of Cannabis sativa cultivars grown specifically for industrial and consumable use– can be used to make a wide range of products. Along with bamboo, hemp is among the fastest growing plants on Earth. It was also one of the first plants to be spun into usable fiber 50,000 years ago. It can be refined into a variety of commercial items, including paper, rope, textiles, clothing, biodegradable plastics, paint, insulation, biofuel, food, and animal feed.

Pretty impressive!

It always seemed insane to me that disapproval of the more “recreational” use of marijuana plants had effectively prohibited the growth of hemp for these multiple benign purposes. (As I understand it–and I probably don’t– plants grown for industrial purposes lack the “recreational” element, but because the varieties look so much alike in the field, neither could be grown in jurisdictions that outlawed pot. In other words, most jurisdictions.)

Now it appears that hemp is being used in yet another promising way: as a climate-friendly building material. As the Guardian reports,

Cannabis sativa, the plant of the thousand and one molecules, has a long and expansive reputation – as a folk medicine, a source of textile fibre for clothes, for making rope or plugging holes in ships.

But now cannabis – or specifically its non-psychoactive variant, hemp – is being touted for something greater still: building blocks for housing that may avoid some of the environmental, logistic and economic downsides of concrete.

The cement industry is responsible for about 8% of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions, alongside problems created by unyielding surfaces and low insulation, or R-value, properties. The search for large-scale alternatives has so far yielded few results, but on a small scale there are intriguing possibilities, including the use of hemp mixed with lime to create low-carbon, more climate healthy building materials.

“There’s an enormous growth potential in the US for hemp fibre used for building and insulation,” said Kaja Kühl, an urban designer and the founder of youarethecity, a design and building practice based in Brooklyn, New York. “Hemp was only legalised in 2018, but now industrial hemp is following the first wave of CBD and cannabis.”

The Guardian reports that there is a “fledgling network of advocates, designers and fabricators” who are working to enlarge the use of bio-based building materials, which they see as a way to dramatically reduce the upfront carbon footprint of materials that can account for some 80% of a building’s carbon lifecycle.

But more recently its ability to capture more than twice its own weight in carbon – twice as fast as traditional forestry – has come into focus. By some estimates, hemp can capture up to 15 tonnes of CO2 per hectare, through photosynthesis. Hemp cultivation taking up only 25% of the world’s agricultural land used for dairy and livestock would close the UN emissions gap of 23 gigatons of CO2 annually.

“Choosing materials that sequester a lot of carbon before they become construction materials can be very beneficial in this quest to get to carbon-neutral by 2050,” Kühl said, pointing out that the hemp that is used is the hurd, from the inner stem, and not the bark that is used for paper or rope.

This is so cool!

It is so easy to become discouraged about the current state of the world we inhabit. Listening to the daily reports of idiocy emanating from our various legislative chambers, cringing from the reports of devastation in Ukraine and the Middle East, scanning the reports of all-too-frequent episodes of mass gun violence…The bad news tends to overwhelm and drown out the good.

We need to remember–as I report here too infrequently–there are a lot of good people in the world doing a lot of very good things. They are making cool discoveries, inventing marvelous things and figuring out new ways to help those who need that help.

Those of us who prefer helping the good guys to feeding the resentments and insecurities of those who are barriers to progress have a job that is both difficult and disarmingly simple: we need to elect lawmakers who want to make it easier–not harder– for the good guys to move humanity to a better place.

At the very least, we need to vote out the MAGAs who want to take us back to a past that never was.

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Now For Something Different

I spend a lot of time on this blog bemoaning the negatives–and there are certainly plenty of negatives to bemoan and warnings that really must be issued and heeded. But it is also the case that–along with the seeming avalanche of threats and reminders of our collective deficits, many good things are occurring.

I get a weekly newsletter titled “Good News for Humankind,” which helps me balance out all the Bad News for Humankind. (I think the actual title is Spark of Genius, and I don’t have a link–but I assume a Google search will lead to a subscription opportunity.)

The most recent newsletter reported the following items:

Nepal has now become the first country in South Asia to recognize a same-sex marriage,  after issuing a formal recognition of a marriage from 1997.

The U.S., Czech Republic, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Iceland, Kosovo and Norway all formally joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance. The Alliance was launched in 2017 by the U.K. and Canada. The new members have committed to not developing new unabated coal power plants and to phasing out existing unabated coal plants. I hadn’t previously encountered the term “unabated” in this context; according to Dr. Google, it means “the use of coal, oil and gas without substantial efforts to reduce the emissions produced throughout their life cycle.”

In other good news for the environment, a court of appeals in Brussels ordered Belgium to cut its planet-heating pollution by at least 55% from 1990 levels by 2030. Evidently, as of 2021, Belgium had cut its emissions by a bare 24%. The court rejected government arguments that minimized the importance of the country’s efforts, arguing that Belgium’s impact on the climate crisis was limited by its small size.

More good news for the environment–and for drivers–comes from a very promising experiment in Detroit. Detroit became first city in the United States to install a wireless-charging roadway. The experiment will begin with the use of a Ford E-Transit fitted with a receiver to gather data; that is part of a five-year pilot project intended to perfect the technology “in real-world settings” and to study its potential for public transport applications. The report said that there are also plans to open the electric road system to the public within the next few years.

Other “good news” items:

Massachusetts became the fifth state  to make prison calls free.

“Ensuring that individuals in state and county prisons can keep in contact with their loved ones is key to enhancing rehabilitation, reducing recidivism, and improving community safety,” Governor Healey said in a written statement.

There are also positive stories from the Good News Network. A small sample of items having an environmental impact:

In the Bay Area of California, home of San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Clara County, and Silicon Valley a famous Pacific resident is heading home for the holidays—up newly-cleaned creeks to spawn.

Who could have thought that the cradle of 21st-century civilization, with its problems and advancements, would have space for wild river ecosystems capable of supporting salmon runs?

But here they are, reports KTVU, as large as 30 pounds, as long as 35 inches, running up the Guadalupe River Watershed by the hundreds.

Google may be defending against anti-trust accusations, but the company with a former “do no evil” motto is also doing good.

An advanced geothermal project funded and developed by Google has begun pumping carbon-free electricity onto the Nevada grid to power the company’s data centers there.

Geothermal energy was once confined in theory to areas of geothermal activity, but if one drills deep enough, there’s extreme heat from the planet’s core essentially everywhere to be harnessed to make steam and drive turbines to create carbon-free electricity 24 hours a day when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

For this reason, Google made an early bet on this enhanced geothermal technology, and partnered with the Utah-based Fervo Energy, which uses drilling techniques from the oil and gas industry to create a first-of-its-kind power plant in Nevada.

GNN reported that initial tests in July showed that the technology was working, in which the hypothesized 3.5 megawatts were indeed being delivered.

When I am particularly depressed by political turmoil and climate change, I try to remember that there are thousands of people around the globe who are working to understand and hopefully solve our most pressing problems. We owe them not only our gratitude, but our own efforts to improve our political and natural environment–beginning with our votes for sane lawmakers next November.

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On The Other Hand…

Sometimes, this blog focuses so much on the crazy, the hateful, and the depressing that the whole human landscape seems bleak. I’m not going to apologize for pointing to the problems we face, because they’re real and we need to think long and hard about solutions. But an unremitting focus on the “dark side” can be misleading.

There are also bright spots in that landscape.

I’ve been subscribing to a Substack newsletter called Persuasion. A recent one consisted of an interview with Yascha Mounk. Mounk is a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and the founder of Persuasion. He recently published a book titled “The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure,” and it was the focus of an interview conducted by Ravi Gupta.

Mounk readily concedes that diversity makes democratic government difficult. The very human proclivity to prefer those with whom we share an identity makes civic equality a “really difficult thing to get right.” But then he says

I also want to make people a little bit more optimistic, because I think when you look at the injustices today, and you don’t have that perspective, you might think, “What’s wrong with us? Why are we so terrible?” But then when you compare it to other times and other places, you realize this is just a really, really hard thing we’re trying to do. Yes, we’re failing in certain respects, but we’re succeeding in other respects. We’re doing much better today than we did fifty years ago. We’re doing vastly better today than we did a hundred years ago. That, I think, can give you the hope to build a vision for the kind of society you want to live in, and to make sure that our society doesn’t fall apart, but actually thrives and succeeds.

At the conclusion of the interview, he returns to that optimism.

When I look at what’s actually going on in society, I don’t despair. America has become much more tolerant in the last decades. We have really rapid socioeconomic progress of minority and immigrant groups, in a way that’s rarely appreciated by either the left or the right. The best study suggests that immigrants from Central or South America, for example, are rising up the socio-economic ranks as rapidly as Irish and Italian Americans did a century ago. This shows that the far-right is wrong in believing that there’s something somehow inferior about them. But it also shows that parts of the left are wrong in thinking that our countries are so racist and so discriminatory that nonwhite people don’t have opportunity. Thankfully, actually, people have opportunity. We see that in the way in which their children or grandchildren in particular are rising up very rapidly. Now, there are also all kinds of sensible things we can do in terms of how we think about our country, the education we engage in, the kind of patriotism we embrace, the kinds of policies and acts of Congress that we should pass—and that’s important, too. But fundamentally, my optimism comes from the developments that I already see happening in society.

Mounk rests his argument on verifiable data; my own (occasional) optimism is more anecdotal and scattered. Just a few of my observations, in no particular order:

When I was still teaching, the university students who filled my classes were overwhelmingly inclusive and committed to their communities, the common good, and the rule of law.

The massive demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd’s murder were multi-racial–the first time I have witnessed widespread diversity in racial protests.

Someone recently reminded me that eighty million Americans came out during a pandemic to vote against Donald Trump.

There’s constant progress on efforts to combat climate change– like recent development of a new, thinner and more efficient solar panel. 

Increasing numbers of out LGBTQ people are being elected to political office, and not just in blue parts of the U.S.

Ketanji Brown Jackson will join the Supreme Court.

For the past week, my husband and I have been on a cruise (we’re headed for Amsterdam to visit our middle son). We have taken previous cruises, and virtually all the couples we met on those trips were devotees of Fox News. I still recall some of the dismissive comments (and worse) leveled by these financially comfortable travelers about poorer (and darker) Americans. I am very happy to report that everyone we’ve had an opportunity to converse with on this trip has at some point indicated strong disapproval of what the GOP has become. Several–like yours truly–identify as “refugees” from the Republican Party.

It’s anecdotal, true…but encouraging.

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There Really Is Good News Out There

One of my New Year’s resolutions (okay, my only New Year’s resolution–I’m old and I’ve learned from past failures…) is to scan the media-verse for positive news, for evidence that not everything in the world is swirling the porcelain bowl.

And guess what? If you look closely, it’s out there, hiding among the predictions of doom, gloom and civil war.

For example, I found “The World in Cheer: 192 Ways the World Got Better in 2021.”

Obviously, I’m not going to list all 192, but I do want to highlight some items from the list, many of them focused on ameliorating climate change. For example, a 5,000 mile line of trees is being planted across the African continent to prevent the spread of the Sahara desert. A California law giving cash to non-car commuters helped increase transit ridership by 50%. The French have enacted a ban on single use plastics for many fruits and vegetables that is projected to reduce plastic packaging by one billion units each year. 

And a company in Vancouver has “upcycled” 33 million chopsticks into everything from cutting boards and shelves to dominos and furniture. 

There are all sorts of other “good news” items that had escaped my notice (and probably the notice of most others in a year dominated by coverage of things like the pandemic and Manchin’s intransigence on the filibuster…). A smattering:

The total number of incarcerated people in the U.S. fell by 13% between 2010 and 2020.

Up to 400 Spanish companies will reduce their employees’ working week to 32 hours while keeping salaries the same. 

El Paso Community College used its pandemic relief aid to forgive $3 million in student debt.

Forty-one women topped the new Fortune 500 list, more than at any other time in the six decades that the list has been published.

A town in Arizona converted a juvenile detention center into a youth hangout, and juvenile arrests in the county dropped by 55%.

In the past eight years, the number of worker-owned co-ops in the U.S. has increased 36%. The business model offers employees, on average, more than $7 more per hour than standard businesses.

There are valuable policy lessons to be learned from most of the items on the list–and there are many more such items. I encourage you to visit the site and review the list when the daily headlines make you want to hide under the bed.

The encouraging economic news isn’t confined to such lists. One of the thorniest problems of the American economy has been the substitution of “gig work” for the steady jobs that offered past generations of workers predictability and benefits. Start-ups like Uber and Lyft seemed likely to accelerate the trend. 

But maybe not. Axios reports that

Startups like Alto, Revel and Kaptyn are positioning themselves as Rideshare 2.0. — alternatives to Uber and Lyft that use employees rather than gig workers as drivers and put fleets of company-owned cars on the road.

Why it matters: These companies’ vertically integrated business models mean they can roll out electric fleets more quickly than the current market leaders, whose pledges to go electric depend on persuading gig drivers to upgrade their personal cars to EVs.

These services will be good for the environment and fair to the drivers.

By employing their own drivers and maintaining their own fleets, these companies aim to provide more consistent, reliable, safe transportation, while ensuring that drivers can earn a decent living — and the companies can make a profit…

Drivers can earn from $15.50 to $18.75 per hour, depending on demand, plus company-paid health insurance.

That we are in an era of massive social and technological change is probably the one thing everyone agrees on. So much of the anger and nastiness we are seeing is a knee-jerk reaction from frightened people rejecting the reality and implications of those changes.

Humanity has been here before. 

My search for “good news” isn’t just an effort to keep me from experiencing suicidal episodes. It is a search for evidence supporting an alternative explanation of our tumultuous times–an explanation that history suggests is as likely as the social disintegration that too many members of the Chattering Classes are predicting. 

Yes, it’s possible that the sheer strength of denial–refusal to see “others” as fully human, rejection of science that calls into question some supposedly “eternal” verities, insistence on the superiority of one’s tribal identity–will plunge the world into another dark age. But  it is equally possible that we are experiencing “birth pangs”–that the millions of people doggedly pursuing social progress and environmental health will ultimately emerge triumphant. 

Our job is to facilitate the trip down the birth canal and help midwife that brave new world….

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