Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, where your intrepid GNR newsroom (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu) bring you the stories to start your week off right.
Not really much to talk about in my personal life, so lets get down to business. The business of good news.
Almost every time a city or an engineer completes a project, there are complaints. It’s easy to point out infrastructure choices that seem nonsensical once you’ve learned about the conditions that make places unsafe or uninviting for people — but it’s a lot harder to actually work with your local engineer to change those conditions.
The “doers” of nuSarnia, an advocacy group in Sarnia, Ontario, have adopted an uncommon approach to advocating for improvements in their city: Instead of reacting in anger to things they don’t like, they’ve tried to bridge the gap between themselves and their city’s officials by supporting projects that the transportation department is already working on that do align with nuSarnia’s vision for safer streets.
“So while there are things that we wish we could change, or we wish could be different, there's enough negative voices out there,” said Tristan Bassett of nuSarnia. “So we always try to keep things positive and supportive where we can.”
Additionally, Bassett said it’s important to not only bring positivity but suggestions as well.
When we all come together we can do amazing things.
Chicago, Ill.,'s transit systems have seen an increase in ridership in a post COVID-19 pandemic timeline, as the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) of Northern Illinois notes May 2024 showed the highest ridership levels since 2019 for Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), Metra and Pace Suburban Bus. The figures represent a nearly 14 percent year-over-year growth for all fixed routes on the three service boards combined.
The three operators provided more than 32 million rides in May, bringing the system to 64 percent recovery compared to 2019 levels. RTA of Northern Illinois says that since January, more than 144 million rides have been taken, an increase of 18 million rides compared to 2023.
Nice to see buses are doing well post COVID.
In the largest public sector trial of the four-day week in Britain, fewer refuse collectors quit and there were faster planning decisions, more rapid benefits processing and quicker call answering, independent research has found.
South Cambridgeshire district council’s controversial experiment with a shorter working week resulted in improvements in performance in 11 out of 24 areas, little or no change in 11 areas and worsening of performance in two areas, according to analysis of productivity before and during the 15-month trial by academics at the universities of Cambridge and Salford.
More proof that we can make working better for the common man.
The first canal-based solar project in the U.S. is nearing completion on tribal lands south of Phoenix, Arizona.
Native Americans have been using canals to irrigate the Gila River Valley for thousands of years, starting with the Huhugam people. Now at least a small slice of the modern-day system of canals that winds through the area will double as a location for generating solar energy for the Pima and Maricopa tribes.
Thousands of miles of federally owned canals stretch across the country, channeling water to thirsty crops, rural communities, and hydropower plants. Placing solar panels over these canals could create a gigawatt-scale source of clean energy with lower environmental impact than large-scale solar farms, but so far the idea has been slow to catch on.
A really neat idea.
The great-billed seed finch (Sporophila maximiliani), thought to be the most trafficked endangered bird species in Brazil, has long been coveted in the caged-bird trade, which has caused the local extinction of the species over most of its former range in the Cerrado savanna.
— One conservation project is working to conserve the species holistically through research and environmental education, while collaborating with bird keepers and breeders to bring the species back to the wild.
— With support from these experts and local communities, the species is being reintroduced in the Cerrado within the Grande Sertão Veredas region between the states of Minas Gerais and Bahia.
Great news for the Seed Finch, You rock little guy.
Every day the Good Good Good team collects the best good news in the world and shares it with our community. Here are the highlights for this week!
If you want to get good news in your inbox every day, join the Goodnewsletter — the free daily newsletter designed to leave you feeling hopeful.
Just leaving this here to properly introduce another good news aggregate we came across. Every little bit helps.
n January, U.S. climate activists prepared for one of the largest direct action protests against fossil fuels in years. The plan was for people to descend on the Department of Energy headquarters for three days of sit-ins protesting a series of massive liquefied natural gas, or LNG, terminals up for approval on the Gulf Coast. If built, the projects would dramatically increase the amount of fossil natural gas being burned around the world. Hundreds of activists readied themselves to risk arrest.
The sit-in never happened, but not because activists lost their nerve. Rather, just a couple weeks before it was to begin, the Biden administration announced it would delay its review of the LNG projects to look at their climate impacts. The eventual fate of the terminals remains uncertain, in light of court challenges and Biden’s shaky re-election prospects. However, the fact that activists moved the administration without one actual arrest represents a remarkable win.
Victory is never as out of reach as it seems. Even the most difficult fight can be won. And we are winning.
A potentially controversial new law will give transportation officials in Delaware more power to re-imagine deadly "stroads" that mix lightning-fast through-traffic with slower local road users — including transforming them into true limited-access highways when a road diet is truly out of reach.
In late June, the Delaware General Assembly passed the Everyone Gets Home Act, which advocacy group Bike Delaware called the "first-ever legislative effort to deal with Delaware’s stroads," and which group leaders believe may be the first such law in the nation.
I mean Stroads just seem like a bad idea in general, either pick one or the other people.
The last two weeks have been among the scariest for liberals and for the broader anti-Trump, pro-democracy coalition since Donald Trump descended the golden escalator and accused Mexicans of being rapists and drug dealers in announcing his candidacy in 2015. President Biden's disastrous debate performance on June 27th was what kicked off the collective alarm and widespread calls for him to withdraw from the race in favor of someone younger. The Republican majority's decision in Trump v. United States, which gives presidents near total legal immunity for official acts during their presidency and which defines official acts so broadly as to make it functionally impossible to ever hold a president legally accountable for lawless or corrupt behavior in office, only added to the pro-democracy coalition's freakout.
The net effect of these two events has been to stoke panic among the friends of freedom both in America and abroad with many succumbing to nihilistic doomerism and despair. While this is a very understandable impulse—I myself had probably my worst mental health day since 2016 this week—despair is neither the right response, nor one we have any right to indulge.
Remember, we only ever truly lose if we stop trying. As long as we keep going, we will win in the end, and nothing Trump or the GOP does is gonna change that.
Homeowners across the country increasingly have access to a powerful carbon-cutting tool: electrification programs, which can make it cheaper for residents to ditch gas and fuel-oil appliances for super-efficient electric equipment. California in particular provides a lot of support, with funding offered by the state itself, utilities, community choice aggregators, cities, and regional energy entities.
But where these efforts could stumble is over the humble electrical panel, according to Sam Fishman, sustainability and resilience policy manager at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR).
Good advice.
ast year, The Optimist Daily wrote an article about how the state government in Indiana was testing roads that could charge EV vehicles while they were being driven. Now, it seems this technology is leaping forward in Detroit.
Inductive charging technology is being connected to two short roadways in Detroit, creating the country’s first wireless electric road system (ERS). The highways will be able to charge electric vehicles that use a particular receiver while driving. By 2023, the road will be completely operational.
I think this more than qualifies for this weeks “Science is awesome” award.
A bright future is dawning in China as the world's largest solar tower project (by expected tower capacity) recently broke ground — and it's a major win for people and the planet alike.
Recently, Northwest Engineering Corporation Limited announced that construction has officially begun on the milestone 200-megawatt solar tower in Delingha, according to Renewable Energy Magazine.
This one would be a close second though.
For half a century, a sprawling lot in Ravenswood, West Virginia, was home to a giant aluminum smelter. But in 2009, Century Aluminum idled the facility, then permanently closed it six years later, and the 2,000-acre site became an empty expanse along the bending banks of the Ohio River.
Now, a different metal-making plant is getting underway on the property — and it will run primarily on renewable energy when it starts operations next year.
Titanium Metals Corporation, or Timet, recently began construction on a facility that will melt titanium to be shaped into parts for airplanes and other uses. Just next door, BHE Renewables is preparing to install arrays of solar panels and large battery systems, which will form a solar microgrid that connects to the titanium facility. Both companies are part of Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate run by Warren Buffett.
Excellent news.
Thermal energy storage uses cheap, clean electricity to bring rocks, bricks, or molten metals to red-hot temperatures, then taps that heat later to do all sorts of work. The technology is relatively simple and could be deployed now to solve two big energy transition challenges: First, it could replace fossil-fueled heating for a wide range of hard-to-decarbonize industries. Second, it could soak up wind and solar power being generated when the grid doesn’t need it and store that power for when it does, enabling round-the-clock renewables.
But the dozens of companies making various forms of thermal energy storage today must clear a couple of key hurdles for the technology to make progress in cutting industrial carbon emissions. The first one? Proving they can scale up their projects enough to cost-effectively and reliably replace all the different kinds of dirty industrial heat.
Rondo Energy is starting to clear this hurdle. In the past few months, the San Francisco Bay Area–based startup has won deals at a half dozen industrial sites in the U.S. and Europe, ranging from food and beverage processing plants to chemicals and cement production facilities.
More good news of the industrial sector cleaning up their act.
n a recent Friday, Joshua Webb and several of his landscaping co-workers were doing their best to escape the late afternoon sun and humidity as they waited for the bus on Midlothian Turnpike in Chesterfield County to take them home.
That bus – the 1A – has been a lifeline for Webb, who started riding it to work as soon as the line was extended from its stopping point near Chippenham Parkway to Walmart Way in Chesterfield last January.
“The 1A is a straight shot here. It goes back to the transfer plaza. It’s very convenient,” Webb said.
It takes Webb about an hour to ride from his home on Commerce Road in Richmond to his job in North Chesterfield. He said taking the bus also helps him save money because it’s free. Before the extension, Webb would pay for Uber or Lyft.
Wish I had a zero fare bus in my neighborhood.
Hawai’i youth have successfully pushed their state DOT to agree decarbonize the transportation network by making it less car-centric — and the legal group behind the settlement says that the win could be a "blueprint" for other states who fail to curb their top source of greenhouse gases.
After what plaintiffs said was the first youth climate lawsuit to target a state transportation agency, the Hawai'i Department of Transportation (HDOT) recently agreed to a slate of aggressive provisions aimed at getting the state's transportation network to net zero by 2045 — including completing the state's pedestrian, bicycle and transit networks in five years and setting goals for reducing vehicle miles traveled alongside overall emissions.
Great news out of Hawaii. Way to go kids.
Editor’s note: This article is the first in a two-part series about how movements can understand and harness the polarizing effects of protest. The first part looks at why disruptive protest is inherently polarizing — and how movements can win in a polarized context. The second part examines key factors that shape whether or not the polarization created by protest actions will be helpful for a cause.]
This spring, student encampments protesting Israel’s war on Gaza spread across colleges throughout the United States, resulting in campus lockdowns, occupied administrative buildings, canceled graduation ceremonies and scores of arrests. But even before this latest wave of action, we have witnessed in recent years a proliferation of disruptive protest, spanning a wide range of social movements.
A small sampling of activity since the start of 2023 could note that animal rights advocates have disrupted the U.K.’s Grand National horse race and Victoria Beckham’s fashion show; abortion rights protesters have been sentenced for impeding the proceedings of the U.S. Supreme Court; striking dockworkers “upended operations at two of Canada’s three busiest ports;” and climate protesters have blocked access to oil and gas terminals, chained themselves to aircraft gangways to prevent private jet sales, and spoken out forcefully at corporate shareholders meetings.
Protesting works because you can’t ignore it. You can ignore politeness, you can ignore reason, you can’t ignore people’s anger.
Brazil is now at the forefront of a group of nations who have demanded an end to this free-for-all. Beginning in 2018, the country joined forces with Indigenous groups around the world as well as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, other mega-biodiverse countries, to demand that the U.N. recognize the sources of these genetic resources and find a way to provide benefits to the people whose traditional knowledge contributes to their use.
In December 2022, in Montreal, at the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, their efforts bore fruit. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which emerged from that meeting, was seen as a major step toward reckoning with how we value the Earth’s resources and the people most responsible for conserving them.
Americans have largely sidestepped these debates over genetic resources, because the U.S. is the only country, along with the Vatican, that has not ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity. But the agreement will certainly impact the U.S., because it will play a role in shaping many of the foods, agricultural products, and drugs of the future, and many of the companies that develop and sell those products are global and have extensive markets in the United States.
Things have really turned around in Brazil since they got rid of Bolsorano or whatever his name was.
Despair is good business for mainstream media, and apparently also for us. We saw a spike in newsletter sign-ups over the past week, likely a “can someone tell me it’s all going to be okay” hangover from a presidential debate that was widely considered disastrous.
We will know soon if President Joe Biden will remain the Democratic nominee. In the links section below, many members of The Progress Network (TPN) make the case that he should step aside.
In this part of the newsletter, however, we typically try to stay out of the partisan fray. There are already plenty of screeds published on whether Biden should stay or go. Adding another one to the pile doesn’t feel helpful.
While we are not partisans, we are big believers in small-l liberal democracy, the basic premise of which is that a government cannot run roughshod over the freedom and rights of its people. So when we do step into politics, it is often to discuss the preservation of democracy. These days, that means we end up talking a lot about far-right populism, like Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party, which during its time governing remade the laws of a nation to preserve its own power.
Which brings us to former President Donald Trump. Perhaps it’s the native—others may say naive—optimist in me, but my hunch is that even if he wins the United States presidential election, we’ll still get to the other side of it with our democracy intact. (This “dispassionate but detailed” viral analysis of the Supreme Court immunity decision helped gird that stance.) But better to avoid that high-stakes, risky game, with its side serving of mass stress.
We won in the UK, we won in France, we won in Brazil, we’re gonna win here in the US too.
ASHINGTON — The House of Representatives on Thursday rejected a resolution to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in "inherent contempt" for failing to turn over the audiotapes of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
The “privileged” resolution, written by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican and Donald Trump ally, had called for the House to impose a $10,000 daily fine on Garland for each day he fails to hand over the audiotapes.
Yep, more of the GOP wasting their time trying to eff with Democrats they don’t like. Utterly pathetic.
Bennie Tillman Jr. lives in a two-bedroom, one-bath house that his father built in Athens, Georgia, back in 1948. By 2022, “it was worn-out,” Tillman told me — drafty on cold winter nights and expensive to keep cool in the Southern summer.
That October, contractors breathed new life into the home. They sealed cracks and gaps in the building’s shell that let outdoor air sneak inside, added a moisture barrier to the dirt-floored basement, and installed insulation in the attic and basement. The energy-saving home makeover was covered by federal funding at no cost to Tillman, 68, or his wife, Annie Mattox.
Now, the home is much better at holding on to heat in the winter and staying cool in the summer. During the hottest and coldest times of the year, the couple saves roughly $200 a month on their energy bills, Tillman said. It’s an amount so sizable for the pair, who live on a fixed income, that he “thought at first it was a mistake.”
Proper weather protection is important. Hopefully my next apartment will be better suited for such things.
On a sunny Wednesday morning, a loud horn sounds before a large crane hoists a 25-ton box skyward in Denver’s Sun Valley neighborhood.
It then swings it into position and as gently as possible, places it on the third floor of what will soon be a six-story apartment building.
The box has windows, insulation, painted drywall, flooring, plumbing and electrical wiring, almost everything needed. Even the appliances are pre-installed, including water heaters, toilets and kitchen sinks. After the boxes are placed, a crew will connect the plumbing and utilities through the corridors, finishing those and eventually the exterior.
“We hope to do a lot more of these,” Adam Berger of Adam Berger Development told the crowd gathered to see the modules put into place on West Holden Place, a 77-unit mixed-income development.
Using a modular approach costs 20% to 25% less than traditional methods and shaves at least 40% off of construction times, Berger said.
As someone looking for a new apartment to live in, this sounds like a godsend to me.
In early June, the far right made sweeping gains in the European Parliament elections, including in France. In a shock bid, French President Emmanuel Macron called an early snap election. His goal: to halt the narrative of the rise of the fascist right, one he didn’t want bedeviling him throughout his remaining three years in office.
The gambit was considered madness. Polls suggested the hard-right National Rally party would win big. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen essentially ran a preelection victory lap, giving a substantial interview to CNN this past Thursday. In it, she vowed to heavily curtail aid to Ukraine.
Yet, when the vote was counted, Macron’s goal of neutering Le Pen seems to have proved successful. The National Rally wound up in third place, behind the unified left and Macron’s centrist party.
Believe it or not, this story is very relevant to our own November elections.
As I said upthread, the resurgance of Fascism across the globe has found itself stymied. Hopefully Trump losing in November will be the final nail in that coffin.
And I think that’s a good leaving off point. A message that we can and will win and November, we just have to keep positive and keep fighting. The wind is at our backs people.