I hope this Saturday finds ya'll well. Here comes another Good News Dump. As always, if you wish to remain in the doom zone, please mute this hashtag, (or me), for a few hours.
Otherwise here we go.
A new law protecting women against discrimination and sexual harassment has come into effect in China. It's the country's most significant reform to women's rights in 30 years, and the only place we were able to find the story was in a law journal and an HR magazine. In case the significance isn't apparent, there are 326 million female employees in China.
Happy World Neglected Tropical Disease Day! It was on the 30th January, and there's a lot to celebrate. 80 million fewer people required treatment in 2021 compared to 2010, a fall of 25% in a decade. Eight countries eliminated a tropical disease last year, 47 countries have now eliminated at least one, and many more are on track to achieving this target.
Schistosomiasis, also known as bilharzia, is a tropical disease caused by parasitic worms, and has plagued people in China for more than 2,100 years. In the 1950s, 11.6 million cases were detected, and approximately 100 million people were at risk. Today, the disease is close to being eradicated. The number of cases in 2021 was 29,041, a reduction of 92.97% from 2008.
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/365720/WER9804-eng-fre.pdf
Researchers in the UK have figured out a way to reduce the risk of colon cancer recurrence by 28%, just by changing the timing of patients’ chemotherapy. The beauty of this approach is that it doesn’t require any additional treatment or new medication. "Doctors around the world will now be able to put these findings into clinical practice, saving many thousands of lives."
The US government just launched a new initiative to allow Americans to directly sponsor refugees. The 'Welcome Corps' is modeled on Canada's successful program, and within 24 hours of its launch, more than 4,000 people had signed up to get more information. "This is a moment for America to be as generous as we know that we can be as a country."
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/24/1150787789/alight-us-refugee-resettlement-policy-biden
Sierra Leone has passed landmark legislation advancing women’s rights. Activists have been fighting for this for more than a decade. The law requires all employers to reserve at least 30% of jobs for women, extends maternity leave to 14 weeks, mandates equal pay, grants equal access to financial support and training and puts an end to six decades of customary laws that prevented women from owning land.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-64348892
https://qz.com/women-in-sierra-leone-can-finally-own-land-1850017536
Did you know 2022 was a great year for LGBTQ rights around the world? Numerous countries removed bans on homosexuality, outlawed conversion therapy and legalized gay marriage. 33 governments have now legalized same-sex unions, triple the number compared to a decade ago. “It feels like something of a tipping point."
Did you know 2022 was a great year for children's rights? Zambia, Mauritius, Comoros and Cuba banned corporal punishment, Cuba, Mauritius, England, Wales and Zambia ended child marriage, Nigeria and Burkina Faso ended military detention of children and Colombia, Republic of Congo and Tunisia agreed to protect education in armed conflict and refrain from using schools for military purposes.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/20/ten-good-news-stories-kids-2022
Enrollments under the Affordable Care Act in the United States have reached an all-time high, driving the nation’s uninsured rate down to record lows. The proportion of uninsured people under the of age 65 is now down to 8%. In 2009, the year before the ACA was enacted, 17.5% of people under 65 lacked insurance. Still no death panels in sight.
China's population decline has been met with almost universal dismay in the Western media, framed as the harbinger of a demographic and economic time bomb that will strain the world’s capacity to support aging populations. Here's the other side of the story, by a Chinese professor of sociology specializing in demographics.
Millions of working people around the world live in extreme poverty, but the good news is that this number has decreased substantially over the last few decades, from 808 million in 1991 to 224 million in 2021. This epic graphic shows what that change looks like over time, broken down into different regions of the world.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/where-are-the-working-poor-living/
One of the world’s biggest oil companies is reporting that global oil demand peaked in 2019. BP's 2023 Energy Outlook is now projecting that global oil demand will fall slowly in the next few years, followed by a rapid decline from around 2030 onwards. Feels like perhaps this should be headline news?
Global investment in the low-carbon energy transition totalled $1.1 trillion in 2022, matching investment in fossil fuels for the first time eve. Nearly every sector, from renewable power to batteries to heat pumps to carbon capture — hit new highs. “Investment in clean energy technologies is on the brink of overtaking fossil fuel investments, and won’t look back.”
China was by far the leading country for attracting clean energy investment last year, accounting for $546 billion or nearly half of the global total. You hear a lot about coal in China, but what you probably didn't hear was that in 2022, China invested 11 times as much money in renewables as it did in coal.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-product/world-energy-investment-2022-datafile
Every single one of the 210 coal plants in the United States (with the exception of one, in Wyoming), now costs more to keep operating than to replace with new wind or solar. That means for every minute they stay on, they don't just emit more carbon - they lose money. “This is a system that is kind of struggling to stay around.”
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30012023/wind-solar-coal-power-plant-costs/
Danske, Denmark’s biggest bank, and the second-largest bank in the Nordic region, has declared an end to fossil fuel financing, and HSBC says it will no longer provide finance for new metallurgical coal mines, with more banks to follow, as has already happened with thermal coal.
2022 was the first year that the EU produced more electricity from solar and wind than from gas. The pace at which this has happened is incredible (we remember reporting when wind and solar overtook coal back in 2019). Three years later, clean energy is the continent's main source of electricity. "Europe is hurtling towards a clean, electrified economy."
Apparently European coal bosses are feeling very sad.
The most important thing nobody is talking about when it comes to clean energy in the US right now is transmission. That's why we were so pleased to see that a 200 km, 3.2 GW capacity transmission line between California and Arizona broke ground last week, and a 616 km, 3 GW capacity line between Montana and Dakota has been announced, the first to connect three regional US electric energy markets.
https://breakthroughenergy.org/news/transmissionby2025/
https://www.pv-tech.org/construction-begins-on-3gw-transmission-line-between-arizona-and-california/
Volkswagen, the world's second largest car manufacturer, had a great year for EVs. Despite supply challenges and manufacturing halts, its customers received 572,100 all-electric vehicles — a 26% increase from 2021.
Suzuki has become the latest automotive manufacturer to read the tea leaves. It will invest $34.8 billion over the next seven years on research, development and capital to make battery electric vehicles. Its first EV models, including small sport-utility vehicles and micro 'kei' cars, will debut in Japan this year.
OK we know we've been banging this drum hard but it's worth repeating. A new study has shown the world has more than enough rare earth minerals and raw materials to switch from fossil fuels to clean energy - and at a fraction of the impact. We do however, need to do it responsibly. “Decarbonization is going to be big and messy, but at the same time we can do it.”
Over 225,000 acres of Minnesota’s pristine Boundary Waters Wilderness will be protected thanks to a 20-year mining ban approved by the Biden Administration. It’s good news for one of America’s most visited wilderness areas and a ‘fatal blow’ for a proposed mining project.
https://grist.org/beacon/a-fatal-blow-to-minnesota-mining-proposal/
Protections for Alaska’s Tongass National Forest have been reinstated, a long-awaited victory for the tribal communities who live in it. Spanning nearly 17 million acres - an area slightly larger than the state of West Virginia – Tongass is home to 800-year-old cedar, hemlock and Sitka spruce trees and over 400 species of land and marine wildlife.
The EPA has finalised a new rule to formally restore federal Clean Water Act protections for streams and wetlands that sustain fish and wildlife and hunting and fishing opportunities. The new rule has been championed by hunters and anglers and will replace the previous administration's Navigable Waters Protection Rule, which significantly narrowed protections.
https://www.trcp.org/2023/01/04/epa-restores-clean-water-act-protections-streams-wetlands/
Following on from our story last week about Miyawaki forests in Paris, pocket forests are also popping up in the Amazon. 14,734 hectares have been reforested using the Miyawaki method, which can restore nature to its original state in around six years. The secret to its speed lies in that it understands the forest as a society … a living ecosystem that continuously renovates itself.
Germany will give Brazil $222 million towards preserving the Amazon. Distributing funds to indigenous groups would be a wise investment; regions of the Brazilian Amazon under indigenous control account for just 5% of forest loss over the last two decades, compared with unprotected areas that have lost up to 14 times more.
A new protected area in British Columbia will permanently safeguard the ‘rarest of the rare’ species including lichens, grizzly bears, wolverines and old-growth cedars and hemlock trees. The 58,000 hectare conservancy in the Incomappleux Valley is one of Canada’s last remaining inland temperate rainforests.
https://thenarwhal.ca/bc-rainforest-protected-area-conservancy
Efforts to save the Western Monarch butterfly are paying off, with 335,479 butterflies migrating to the Californian coastline last year, a welcome increase from less than 2,000 butterflies in 2020. Local efforts continue to double down on protecting the overwintering sites, restoring habitats, and stopping the use of pesticides.
https://xerces.org/press/western-monarch-count-tallies-over-330000-butterflies
For over 200 years, Phillip Island, off the coast of Victoria, was overrun by feral pigs, goats and rabbits introduced during European settlement. The result was devastating, completely destroying the island's vegetation. In 1979 an eradication program begun and by 1988 non-native species were successfully eliminated from the island. The change is astonishing. Nature will recover - if we let it.
Ireland’s Greater Skellig Coast has become the country’s first ever 'Hope Spot' — an area scientifically identified as critically important to marine conservation. The designation will protect roughly 7,000 km2 of Irish coastal waters and is part of a global initiative by Mission Blue, who have designated 148 Hope Spots around the world.
https://greennews.ie/new-spot-of-hope-for-irelands-ocean-conservation-movement/
Rewilding charity Heal has bought 460 acres of land in Somerset to kickstart an effort to create nature reserves spanning 48 English counties by 2050. The Somerset site will become a blueprint for the project and will include food growing areas, community meeting spaces and rare-breed cattle, pigs, and ponies to graze land in a natural way.
The basic design of propellers hasn't changed much in thousands of years. That might be about to change though, with the arrival of toroidal propellors, which have strange, twisted shapes that distribute vortices across the entire prop, instead of just at the tip. The result? They're radically quieter in both air and water, and result in huge efficiency gains.
An international team of scientists say they've found a way to directly electrolyze seawater into hydrogen, bypassing the need for high-purity water. By putting an acid layer over the surface of the catalysts (the metals that facilitate the electrochemical process), ocean water can be directly converted into clean fuel, without the need for expensive purification.
Four dots of light, moving around a black disk. Doesn't seem like much, but what you're looking at is one of the most incredible time-lapse videos we've ever seen - an actual planetary system. Using observations collected over 12 years, an astrophysicist has imaged four massive gas giants orbiting a star named HR8799 that's 133 light-years from Earth.
https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2023/01/watch-distant-worlds-dance-around-their-sun/
@corlin the amazing thing about Philip Island is that the non native species that were removed included humans. At the Summerland Peninsula, a community was removed, houses demolished or moved, to protect the tiny penguin colony (the penguin March continues to be an attraction to locals and tourists) https://amp.abc.net.au/article/9464698
@Astro_yyz
Wow.
I did not know this.
Thanks.
@corlin no worries. Excellent dump; thank you for putting all of those stories together; that’s a lot of work
#CoSoGoodNews
Remember how every headline screamed "COAL IS COMING BACK" when European countries reactivated some coal plants last year? Well, thanks to wind and solar, they were hardly used. The continent's 26 coal units placed on standby over winter ran at an average of just 18% capacity. “Any fears of a coal rebound are now dead.”
https://www.energymonitor.ai/sectors/power/europe-any-fears-of-a-coal-rebound-are-now-dead/