It is time again for the very long 🧵on good news you might have missed. Please mute this hashtag, for a day, if you wish to remain in a doom loop.
The fight against measles is one of humanity's greatest achievements of the 21st century. Despite a brief resurgence in 2019, and a fall in vaccination rates during the pandemic, between 2000 and 2021 the annual number of measles deaths fell from 761,000 to 128,000; saving an estimated 56 million lives. An astonishing feat that deserves far more attention.
http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/364731/WER9747-eng-fre.pdf
Singapore has eliminated rubella - the leading vaccine-preventable cause of birth defects worldwide. This follows Singapore's elimination of measles in 2018. Seven countries in the WHO's Western Pacific Region have now interrupted endemic transmission of the virus that causes rubella: Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Hong Kong SAR, Macao SAR, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea and Singapore.
https://www.who.int/westernpacific/news/item/16-09-2022-rubella-eliminated-from-singapore
About 160,000 new HIV infections among children under five occurred last year, a dramatic 50% decline from 320,000 infections in 2010. Since the launch of a global plan in 2011 to prevent mother-to-child transmission programmes, 1.5 million deaths and 2.9 million HIV infections have been averted worldwide among pregnant women and children.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Cambodia's landmine removal program. Since 1992, over a million landmines and three million explosives have been removed, and 2,531 km2 has been cleared and made safe for the construction of homes, schools, farms and roads for nine million people. Deaths have fallen from 4,320 in 1996 to less than 100 in 2021.
Millions of Alzheimer’s patients have been given hope after a new drug has been shown to slow memory decline by 27% over 18 months. It's the biggest breakthrough in a generation, marking what experts have called the 'beginning of the end' of Alzheimer’s and offering “real optimism that dementia can be beaten and one day even cured.”
Sierra Leone is allocating almost a quarter of its entire budget to education as part of its ongoing effort to ensure every child in the country gets free schooling. Since 2018, enrolment rates have surged from 2.0 to 3.1 million students, and there's been a highly progressive shift in completion at every level of education.
Bangladesh has the lowest rate of infant and maternal mortality in south Asia. The maternal mortality rate has fallen from 269 per 100,000 live births in 2009 to 165 per 100,000 today, and child mortality has declined by 63% since the turn of the century. It's the eighth most populated country in the world - millions of lives have been saved.
France has moved a step closer to becoming the first country to enshrine abortion as a constitutional right, after lawmakers approved a resolution in the lower house to guarantee access to “the right to voluntarily end a pregnancy”. Four in five people in France, from across the political spectrum, want abortion rights to be better protected under the constitution.
The roads of 22 of the world's major cities have become a lot safer in the last decade. Following a combined 2010 pledge, road fatalities and serious injuries have fallen by an average of 4% a year, with a particularly noticeable decline during the pandemic.
https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/monitoring-progress-urban-road-safety-2022.pdf
A rigorous new study from Stanford has found no meaningful association between the age at which kids receive their first smartphones and their wellbeing, as measured by grades, sleep habits and depression symptoms. In short - all kids have phones and no, it doesn't make them depressed. Naturally, not headline news.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/11/children-mobile-phone-age.html
For the first time since the early 90s, wealth inequality is falling in America. Since December 2020, the wealth of the top income percentiles has fallen significantly, while the wealth of the bottom 50% has risen by 26%. Wealth share under the current administration has also shifted to the benefit of bottom 50%.
Canada's overall poverty rate fell from 14.5% in 2015 to 10.3% in 2019, and 6.4% in 2020. This means that Canada has met both its interim target of reducing poverty by 20% by 2020 (relative to 2015 levels) and of reducing poverty by 50% by 2030 - ten years ahead of time.
Russia is losing a war to a country a quarter its size, Iran is experiencing massive protests, and China is struggling with a lockdown dilemma and a sputtering economy. The United States has record low unemployment, inflation is coming down and election deniers lost the midterms. Europe, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand are all economically resilient, politically stable. This sounds crazy, but what if everything... is going to be okay?
The Global Mangrove Alliance launched a new initiative at COP27 to restore and protect an additional 15 million hectares of mangroves globally by 2030. It will build on good momentum - globally, net mangrove deforestation has essentially flatlined, and 42% of the world’s mangroves are protected, an increase of 17% since 2012.
'The Bengal Water Machine' is a nature-based solution in Bangladesh that relies on the country's 16 million smallholders pumping up groundwater, rivalling the storage capacity of the world’s large dams. It's enabled the country's farmers to make it world’s fourth highest producer of rice, drastically improving food security and resilience to climate change.
https://www.scidev.net/asia-pacific/news/bangladeshs-rice-farmers-tap-underground-reservoirs/
Israel and Jordan are teaming up to save their shared waterway, the Jordan River. Efforts will focus on increasing treatment facilities, upgrading sewer systems and promoting sustainable agriculture to restore water supply and at least 50% of lost biodiversity.
After a 50 year absence, swift foxes have returned to the grasslands of Fort Belknap in Montana. Three years into the recovery program, 130 foxes have been released into the wild and are already reproducing, a critical milestone for a self-sustaining population. Local tribes have worked tirelessly for decades to bring indigenous wildlife back to the area.
An ambitious plan to save Louisiana’s coastal communities and ecosystems will divert sediment and water from the Mississippi into the Barataria Basin. The $20 billion project is the largest coastal restoration project in the US, and expected to create over 6,200 acres of land in its first decade. Settlement money from the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon spill will foot the bill.
Thanks to conservation efforts in China, a number of endangered species are recovering. The Yangtze finless porpoise population has reached nearly 100 while the population of milu deer has expanded from 64 in 1990 to around 2,500 today. Sightings of Shennongjia golden monkeys are also increasing.
http://www.china.org.cn/china/Off_the_Wire/2022-11/03/content_78500978.htm
The European Commission just approved €380 million of funding for 168 new biodiversity, circular economy, climate adaptation and clean energy projects across the continent. The biggest chunk has been reserved for 27 nature and biodiversity projects that will support the implementation of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and the proposed Nature Restoration Law.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_6983
Cities around the world are installing artificial islands brimming with grasses and sedges to clean up their waterways. An acre of floating wetland can absorb pollution from 7-15 acres of urban development while creating a refuge for wildlife. Baltimore was one of the first to trial the invention and the project has been so successful they plan to expand the islands to 10,000 square feet in 2024.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/floating-wetlands-cities-pollution
Abu Dhabi’s single-use plastic policy has reduced the use of single-use plastic bags in retail stores by 87 million, the equivalent of half a million bags a day since launching in June. The ban was implemented to address the 11 billion plastic bags used in the Emirates each year, which is almost four times the global average.
After peaking in 2014, investment in oil and gas in Britain has plummeted by three-quarters to £3.7 billion last year, and jobs have fallen by half. By contrast, investment in offshore wind last year was £6.7 billion, and jobs are booming, with many who honed their skills on offshore oil platforms making the switch.
China’s wind turbines are going to get a whole lot cheaper next year. One of the country's top four turbine makers says export prices will drop by up to 20% per kilowatt in 2023, as as newer units become more efficient and other technological advances are made. Imagine being a fossil gas executive and seeing that news?
At least $25.7 billion of clean-energy factories are now in the works in the United States. Most of these projects (and the jobs that come with them) are in red states. Dalton, Georgia for example, is now home to the biggest solar panel factory in the Western Hemisphere. Conservatives might not believe in climate change, but they do believe in good blue collar jobs.
For the third year running, wind, solar, and batteries will account for roughly 80% of new capacity, meaning that sun, wind and water will generate 22% of US electricity this year, more than coal at 20% and nuclear at 19%. The day they said would never come has arrived: clean has beaten coal, and gas is next.
After years of trying to slow down the energy transition, utilities in the US are now joining forces to speed it up. Their new stance is driven (wait for it) "less by evolving ideology than the changing economics of renewable energy." Surprise surprise. Money turns out to be a better motivator than doing the right thing.
Barclays, one of Europe’s biggest coal financiers, said its analysis of the IRA has led it to commit to wind down its funding for coal in the US five years earlier than planned. The bank now expects to phase out its financing of thermal coal power by 2030.
A court in Belgrade has ordered state-owned energy company EPS to cut the sulphur dioxide emitted by its coal plants after experts proved the practice is causing excess deaths from cardiovascular diseases. The ruling signals a radical shift in the protection of public health and the environment in Serbia.
Caterpillar just successfully demonstrated its first battery electric large mining truck. Fully loaded, the truck achieved a top speed of 60 km/h, then travelled one kilometer up a 10% grade at 12 km/h, before coming back down the hill again, regenerating that energy via braking back into the battery.
Electric scooters in France are not a fad. In 2021, four years after they first appeared, 900,000 were sold, up by 42% compared to 2020. "We can't just dismiss a versatile means of transport that helps people get out of the car and sells almost a million units a year."
In China, 31% of all cars sold last month were battery EVs or plugin hybrids. If electrification continues at this pace, the plugin share will be 45% a year from now, and battery EVs will be one third of the market. Nobody predicted anything close to this. Astonishing.
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/11/24/china-electric-car-sales-22-fully-electric-31-have-a-plug/
Google’s AI algorithm for screening for breast cancer, shown in a 2020 to perform better than human radiologists, will now be part of commercial mammograms around the world. The technology has just been licensed to a medical company that provides breast cancer detection services to 7,500 health care facilities globally.
Scientists in Tel Aviv have invented a new way to destroy cancerous tumours via ultrasound and nanotechnology. "Our new technology makes it possible to inject nanobubbles into the bloodstream, which then congregate around the cancerous tumour. After that, using a low-frequency ultrasound, we explode the nanobubbles, and thereby the tumour.” Simple right?
This is not plant-based salmon, nor is it wild or farmed. It’s cultivated: grown from real Coho salmon cells in a brewery-like system, harvested, and then grown on 3D, plant-derived scaffolds to recreate the texture of natural fish fillets. The white banding (which is not just fat in natural salmon) is a product of how the salmon cells are grown within the scaffolds. Apparently it tastes amazing.
Not quite sure how to describe this essay by philosopher Justin Smith. A screed against consumerism? A celebration of sobriety? A rumination on the contradictions of middle age? None of those quite do it justice. "It is surely a blessing to live long enough to learn to stop searching in vain for sources of transcendence in the common substances of this world, however rarefied they are made, however spirit-like, by the long art of men."
Meet Vadana Shiva, a 70 year old physicist turned ecofeminist. In 1991 she launched Navdanya, which in Hindi means 'nine seeds.' The program supports small farmers in rescuing endangered crops and plants and makes them available through direct marketing. Over the past two decades Navdanya has helped two million farmers, set up 150 seed banks across India and saved 4,000 rice varieties and 31 varieties of wheat along with vegetables, and medicinal plants.
That's All Folks.
I do this about every two weeks.
You may not feel hopeful, but perhaps not as pessimistic.
@corlin Good news matters. Thank you for interrupting our regularly scheduled doomscrolling.
@corlin Great read. I'm adding the #recoveryposse tag.
@corlin that is a good read
Thank you
@corlin thanks so much for posting this - it is not something i would have come across, and if i had i would not have read it without your explanation. and i have subscribed to his podcast now as well!
#philosophy
#sobriety
@corlin this somehow weirdly reminds me of the scene in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the Restauránt at the End of the Universe when the daily special is a bovine creature who wants you to eat it. naturally, Arthur is paradoxically repelled by it.
weird.
If they're able to replicate this process for other meat sources we'd be able to say goodbye to factory farming! ❤️
@corlin I love mine. 🖤🖤🖤
@corlin There are a lot of them here in Peru too.
@corlin Sadly, the USA is a car-dependent nation, owned by big oil. In Rural areas, people who have no car, and no reliable transportation are screwed. This country will never change.
@corlin btw those trucks are TOTALLY BADASS gigantic engineering marvels
@corlin
See also Volvo's Zeux which is possibly nightmare fuel but I think is rad:
https://youtu.be/6x86uiXHiUg?t=756
#EV #autonomous
nosanitize
@corlin Meanwhile in MI DTE continues to not only burn coal but also import and sell coal to others while discouraging rooftop solar by refusing or underpaying for energy buyback. Want more than 15% of your energy from renewables? That will be extra $$$
Don't get me wrong, we always knew it would be an uphill fight and glad to see any progress.
@corlin I understand why they did that but it pisses me the freak out that blue states aren't getting more of those jobs.
@corlin That's awesome!❤🌱🌲🌳
#CoSoGoodNews
The 19th meeting of CITES has produced new trade regulations for over 600 animal and plant species, including new protection for sharks, glass frogs, turtles, songbirds, and tropical timber species. The most significant development was the protection of requiem and hammerhead sharks which account for 95% of the global fin trade.
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/11/new-protections-for-sharks-songbirds-frogs-and-more-at-cites-trade-summit/