Sorry to be a spoilsport but I have good news about the world…

Bombarded by all the doom and glood that we humans are so addicted to it is easy to forget to see what is really happening on the ground.

Here are a handful of amazing trends around the world that should restore your faith in a our ability to create a better world. The reason I’m sharing this in this week’s newsletter isn’t just to cheer you up: it is to remind you to not lose focus and to and to keep at ‘it’, whatever the “it” is for you (starting a business, finding a job, building a family, making a difference in your community, devleoping a new solution, improving a service, etc). Working at ‘it’ is what these organisations and people kept doing when many others thought the mountain of change was too high to climb…

Two things to remember:

Lucky breaks are almost always a result of persistency.

1. Start and keep working at your solution even if you have absolutely no clue how the end solution will be (in Italy they are testing right now highways that induction-charge electric cars while they drive on it, something almost no-one would have imagined possible when electric cars were first rolled out.
2. Great innovation and ‘lucky breaks’ are almost always a product of persistency. The songwriter and singer Nick Cave is a brilliant example of this (google his work ethic). In the words of Gary Player (a famous golfer), “the more I practice the luckier I get”.

Ready for a bit of good news?

Source? the amazing people at Future Crunch. Please follow them (and if you want to support their amazing work)

• Global renewables growth is much faster than expected with China leading the way closely followed by Europe, India and Latin America (China, Europe and US are the worse contributors to global pollution so this is doubly good news!).
• China tripled solar power investments in the first 4 months of 2022 from the year before.
• Denmark, Germany, Netherlands and Belgium are building a 150GW offshore wind farm. To give perspective: total worldwide wind farms capacity at present is 25GW.
• Kenya generates now 40% of all its electricity from geothermal power plants and soon adding hydropower to its portofolio.
• European commission is introducing a provision to make solar panels mandatory on all buildings.
• California passed an act into law which requires the two biggest pension funds to divest from fossil fuels.
• Volvo will be only manufacturing trucks using fossil-free steel.
• Clean-energy vehicles in China account now for 23% of China’s passenger car market. I know that it doesn’t mean cars are clean (it is enormously polluting to manufacture them… but a step in the right direction).
• In the US (the world’s 2nd largest car market) electric cars are now cheaper on a monthly basis than fuel cars).
• Thanks to all these electric cars the world is using 1.5m barrels of oil less EACH day. Plus it cancelled 3.4% of global transport demand for oil…
• Europe removed 239 dams in 2021 with wind and solar outcompeting hydroelectricity and more will be eliminated (dams are hugely damaging to natural ecosystems).
• Despite Brazil’s idiotic president attempts, some of the world’s biggest mining companies have withdrawn requests to extract minerals from the amazon.
• Americans are eating 40% less meat between 2003 and 2018. This has resulted in a 35% decrease in greenhouse emissions there. Also a trend away from dairy, eggs, chicken and pork which are hugely polluting sources of (not particularly healthy) food.
• Teenage drinking around the world is declining steadily for the last 20 years.
• Ebola is now officially defeated thanks to vaccines and clinical treatments.
• 5 African countries have eliminated sleeping sickness completely thanks to great public health campaigns.
• Terrorism death around the world continues to decline despite overall number of attacks increasing, highliting that terrorism is becoming less lethal (total deaths 2021 globally: 7.142).
• Assisted dying is now legal in Australia for terminally ill patients and specific conditions (I personally love this having watched my father suffer a long period of pain).
• China developed a salt-tolerant rice variety which can be grown in salty soils near the sea. It means over 70.000 hectares of new plantations by end of 2022.

You can reads hundreds of other positive news at TechCrunch website

Cheer up my friends! See you next week.

York