Citizen Cartwright

Good news on aid arriving in Gaza, climate, global wage equality

Now that I’ve subscribed to Fix the News, I’m seeing this morning that there apparently are 14 items in this issue that are free to view. The items I’ve headlined are among those.

 

Another 32 items seem to be password protected by Fix the News, so I’ll summarize three of those that link to articles that don’t require a subscription:

 

— The Guardian has a series called "The Alternatives" that documents ways local communities and governments around the world are implementing ideas for a low-carbon way of life. 

 

— A new storage technique can keep protein-based drugs and vaccines stable without keeping them cold, potentially eliminating the need for refrigeration for hundreds of medicines, Reuters reports, citing a study in the journal Nature Communications.

 

— In Bangladesh, access to basic electricity increased from 14 percent in 1991 to 99 percent in 2021, according to Our World in Data.

Trump is inaugurated, issues promised deluge of executive orders

The president, flanked by his family and tech billionaires, delivered a second inaugural address on Monday that “promised massive national success, pledging an expansion of U.S. territory and an end to foreign wars, with a sweeping indictment of the status quo,” as The Associated Press puts it.

 

Trump’s aides had said the speech would focus on unity.

 

But with his presidential predecessors sitting nearby, by the third paragraph Trump was referring to “the vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government.”

 

In paragraph five: “For many years, the radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens. While the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair, we now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad.”

 

Shortly afterward, Trump spoke to supporters in another area of the Capitol and said he’d toned down his speech at the urging of his wife and his vice president.

 

The first of Trump’s executive orders rescinded 78 Biden actions, on topics including racial equity, gender discrimination, climate change, the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic, additional ethics requirements for political appointees, lowering prescription drug costs, sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and the withdrawal of offshore drilling from some areas, according to The Washington Post.

 

Other orders include:

 

— Ending birthright citizenship

— Declaring a “national emergency” on the southern border, among other things directing the military to make it priority to “seal the borders”

— Addressing the “cost-of-living crisis”

— Requiring federal workers to return to the office

— Freezing federal hiring

— Establishing the “Department of Government Efficiency”

— Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement

— Ending the “weaponization” of the federal government

— Delaying the ban on TikTok for 75 days

— Pardoning 1,500 convicted Jan. 6 defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 others

— Officially recognizing two sexes

— Expanding energy production and temporarily stopping wind leasing, ending the “electric vehicle mandate”

— Withdrawing from the World Health Organization

— Starting the process to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America

— Declaring drug cartels terrorist organizations

 

Congress and the courts potentially can block executive orders, says a separate AP explainer.

 

Here is a transcript of Trump’s inaugural address, by AP.

 

Here is the text of the executive orders, from the White House.

Biden’s legacy: Credit where credit is due

As Joe Biden leaves political life, his record shows once again that every leader, like every human, makes mistakes. But I want to take a minute to celebrate his skill in enacting laws that will benefit Americans into the future.

During the last Trump administration, it was noted that the U.S. government was being run by people who didn’t value government or governing. Lawmakers who didn’t value lawmaking had no motivation to become skilled at it.

In an earlier time, during my 14 years as a congressional staffer, I saw close-up the value of lawmaking. I saw lawmakers of both parties — including then-Sen. Biden and future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who modeled the skills of crafting and enacting legislation.

 
And during the first two years of the Biden administration, with Biden in the White House and Pelosi the House speaker, I was heartened to see those skills again being used skillfully.

Biden talked about his economic legacy in a speech last month at the Brookings Institution. He said his administration had embraced a different approach after trickle-down economics that benefited wealthy Americans first. He focused on growing the economy from "the middle out and the bottom up," to the advantage of the middle class.

Biden was able to enact, despite narrow majorities in the House and Senate, major legislation including:

— The $1 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, to repair America's roads, bridges and railways; bring high-speed internet to rural communities; increase the resilience of the electric grid; and upgrade drinking water, wastewater and stormwater infrastructure 

— The most significant gun safety legislation in 30 years
— The $53 billion CHIPS and Science Act to bring back manufacture of semiconductor chips to the United States from China
— The Inflation Reduction Act, which included the most significant climate change legislation in U.S. history, as well as a cap on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs for people on Medicare

A more complete list of Biden’s accomplishments in those first two years is here.

But despite headlines such as The Wall Street Journal’s on Oct. 22 that the "U.S. economy again leads the world, IMF says," and inflation of 2.4 percent, voters put Republicans in control of the White House and both the Senate and House.

In his speech at Brookings, Biden highlighted the creation of 16 million jobs, the most in any single presidential term and the lowest average unemployment in 50 years.

 

In a CBS News article published this morning, Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, says: "He should have a strong legacy when it comes to the economy. He inherited an economy that was flat on its back because of the COVID pandemic, and he's leaving an economy that's flying high, at least in the aggregate."

"How much he can take credit for that, it's a reasonable debate, but I think he deserves a lot of credit," Zandi says.

Biden has noted that most of the positive effects of his policies will be felt over the next 10 years.

Biden aides have privately told The Associated Press that they expect President Trump to continue Biden's planned projects and take credit for Biden’s accomplishments, just like the Republicans in Congress who’ve celebrated plant openings and infrastructure developments in their districts after having voted against them.

Good news in 2024

Fix the News’ year-end roundup has 86 examples of good news in global health, conservation, living standards, energy, human rights, and science and tech.

 

No matter how busy you may be, I hope you’ll at least have time to scroll through this issue to experience the abundance of good will and good work that’s improving the lives of our human family in so many ways.

Good news on electric vehicles, research, education

Fix the News has completed its year-end roundup and started its break until mid-January.

 

Let’s save the roundup for January and focus on the other issue that’s waiting for us. Here are highlights:

 

— Norway is on the cusp of becoming the world's first all-electric vehicle car market, Bloomberg reports. 

 

— India was the third largest producer of research papers globally last year, but thousands of Indian students and researchers couldn't read many of them because their institutions couldn't afford subscriptions.

 

Now the Indian government has announced a deal with publishers that will provide an estimated 18 million students, faculty and researchers free access to nearly 13,000 journals through a single portal, says Science. 

 

— High school teacher Graeme Mitchell says in a TEDx talk that he spends half of class time focusing on stories of progress. He says, “The information we consume shapes the way we think and act. By curating the right inputs, we can transform fear into action, pessimism into progress, and build a future filled with possibility.”

Good news on tuberculosis, solar energy, clean water

We have a couple of issues waiting for us from our friends at Fix the News. They’re putting together their year-end wrap-up for next week, before taking a break until mid-January.

 

From the Nov. 28 edition: 

 

— Africa has made the greatest progress among all regions in tackling tuberculosis — the world’s deadliest infectious disease — with a 42 percent reduction in deaths since 2015, according to a World Health Organization report.

 

—  It took the solar PV industry 68 years to reach 1 terawatt (a trillion watts) of installed capacity — and just two more to add the second terawatt. Two terawatts of solar "is equivalent to the total installed electricity capacity of India, the USA and UK combined,” says the Global Solar Council.

 

— Between 2000 and 2020, access to safe water in China increased from 46 percent to 91 percent, according to the journal BMC Public Health.

Good U.S. news on climate, clean energy, health care

Among the items in this week's Fix the News:

 

— Donald Trump can’t stop the clean energy revolution, says the nonprofit Grist. 

 

"The irony of Biden’s signature climate bill is states that overwhelmingly support Trump are some of the largest recipients of its funding,” says Grist. 

 

About 66 percent of all of the spending in the bill has gone to red states, according to Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, a climate research nonprofit. “There certainly is a contingency in the Republican Party now that’s going to support keeping some of those subsidies around.”

 

— “How many people could tell you that, over the course of America’s campaign cycle, we passed the line where humans are installing a gigawatt’s worth — a nuclear power plant’s worth — of solar panels each day? Not many, I think, because when I supply that news to crowds of (environmentally interested) people they audibly gasp in pleasure,” says environmentalist and author Bill McKibben in the Columbia Journalism Review.

 

California has used a quarter less natural gas to generate electricity this year than last year because its solar panels and batteries have achieved critical mass, he says. 

 

A quarter less natural gas in a year in California — the world’s fifth-largest economy — “is the biggest single bite yet taken out of the eventual temperature of the Earth, and yet it is passing mostly unnoticed,” McKibben says.

 

— Out of 10 states with ballot initiatives this year to guarantee abortion rights in their state constitutions, seven states approved them, says NPR.

 

For example, Missouri was the first state to ban abortion — even in cases of rape and only with an exception for medical emergencies. Abortion access now will be guaranteed up to the point of fetal viability (generally the 24th week of pregnancy).

Democrats have prepared for 2 years for coming Trump actions

Democracy Forward, a liberal-leaning legal organization, has "unveiled a large-scale new effort aimed at thwarting President-elect Donald J. Trump’s second-term agenda from his first day in office," says The New York Times.

 

Unlike in 2017, when Democratic lawyers were unprepared for the onslaught of conservative policies, the intent is to be ready to unleash lawsuits immediately.

More than 800 lawyers at 280 organizations are developing cases and workshopping challenges to what the group has identified as 600 “priority legal threats” — potential regulations, laws and other administrative actions that could require a legal response, its leaders say. 

 

Democracy Forward has spent the last two years working to identify the possible actions the new Trump administration could take on issues they see as key priorities to defend, the group’s leaders say, using as a blueprint Trump’s first-term actions, his campaign promises and plans released by his allies, including the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 agenda.

Democracy Forward’s new project is called Democracy 2025. It’s focusing on issues including abortion rights, health care, climate change and other environmental protections, union protections and immigration. The group also has given particular weight to Trump’s promises to weaponize the systems of government, particularly the Justice Department, against those he sees as enemies, along with his pledges to dismantle federal agencies and fire thousands of government workers, the Times says.

 

The lawyers are preparing to challenge new regulations released by the Trump administration, even starting the process of recruiting potential plaintiffs who would have legal standing in court. They’re also exploring ways to take over the defense of Biden administration policies that are in litigation, such as student debt relief and women’s health protections, that now are being defended by the Justice Department and are unlikely to be continued under Trump.

Democracy Forward has "deep ties" to a number of prominent party strategists and lists election lawyer Marc Elias and Ron Klain, President Biden’s former White House chief of staff, as members of its board, says the Times.

 

The coalition has a multimillion-dollar war chest, according to the Times. Its partners include organizations such as unions, immigration advocacy organizations and groups working on abortion rights, civil rights and consumer protection.

Good news — about us!

As our Australian friends at Fix the News published their most recent edition, the first results were coming in from our election.

 

They’ve been pretty snarky about us in the past, but this time, they wrote:

 

"For what it's worth, the US stock market is at all-time highs, the uninsured rate is near an all-time low, life expectancy is at highest level ever, apartment construction hasn’t been this hot in half a century, inflation, illegal immigration, crime and obesity are falling, wages are higher than any point in history, the percentage of the population that is employed is near an all-time peak, productivity is outpacing every other comparable country, carbon emissions are declining, clean energy production is soaring, next month America's factories will start mass producing the most advanced technology on Earth, and it's still the wealthiest and most important nation in the world."

Good news on global health, climate change

Among the items in the latest issue of Fix the News:

 

— Tuberculosis is the world's leading infectious cause of death, after being replaced by the coronavirus during the pandemic.  TB caused an estimated 1.25 million global deaths in 2023, down from 1.32 million in 2022, 1.42 million in 2021, 1.40 million in 2020 and 1.34 million in 2019, the World Health Organization reports. 

 

So death rates are down. But, as Fix the News notes, the headlines tend to be the bad news that TB is the top killer and that cases are rising. Meanwhile, the WHO report says, "Most of the global increase in incident cases between 2022 and 2023 reflects population growth.”

 

"Urgent action is required to end the global TB epidemic by 2030," a goal that's been adopted by all member nations of the UN and WHO, the report says. Shall we take a second to celebrate that this is even a feasible goal?

 

— A new class of drugs that mimics the action of a naturally occurring hormone, glucagon-like peptide (glp-1) “could transform how chronic diseases are managed,” says The Economist. For decades used to treat diabetes, they’re now “wildly popular” as Wegovy for weight loss and showing promise in trials for sleep apnea and kidney disease.

 

They’re also being tested for liver disease and substance-abuse disorders. And they’re being discussed as a treatment for long-term infections, to delay dementia and even for anti-aging and longevity. 

 

— Materials scientists at UC Berkeley have invented a fluffy yellow powder called COF-999; less than half a pound of it can suck as much carbon dioxide out of the air in a year as a large tree, says the Los Angeles Times. The carbon dioxide then can be pumped underground and the powder re-used.