Stephan: The Nordic countries examplars of what happens to a society that makes wellbeing at every level its first priority, are leading the way in many areas that improve the quality of life for the people who live in those countries, and for the planet itself. When you look at the social outcome data you have to ask: why does the United States seem to be unable to match the Nordic success? Why are people in those countries so much happier, healthier, wealthier, and better educated? Why do they live longer? Don't you think those questions are worth answering? And, if you don't why don't you?
Electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming increasingly popular in countries such as Norway.
Credit: James D. Morgan
Call them the kings in the north.
Drivers in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden and – chief among them – Norway have become the world leaders in buying electric vehicles.
Together the five Nordic countries, home to roughly 0.4 percent of the planet’s population, accounted for 8 percent of the world’s battery-powered, fuel-cell and plug-in hybrid-electric cars and trucks in 2016, according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.
Although the Nordic nations trail the
U.S. and
Chinain total electric vehicle sales, in
Norway alone electric vehicles made up 39 percent of new car sales in 2016. In the U.S., by comparison, electric vehicles accounted for just
1.4 percent of new car sales the same year.
The key reason is economics: With the exception of that pickup-truck commuter or midlife-crisis convertible, automobiles are one area where consumers generally tend to act rationally. High upfront costs force buyers […]
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Gretchen Goldman, Research Director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists - Scientific American
Stephan: Republican don't like facts, and will go to great lengths to see they don't get discovered, or don't get out. You think I am exaggerating? Read this.
We are all paying the price for this incompetent stupidity . and willful ignorance, never forget that.
Credit: Ralf Vetterle Pixabay
The EPA is reportedly on the verge of restricting the science that EPA can use in decisionmaking and I’m livid. This is a move that serves no purpose other than to prevent the EPA from carrying out its mission of protecting public health and the environment. If Pruitt’s proposal looks anything like House Science Committee Chairman’s HONEST Act or its predecessor the Secret Science Act, we know it will be nonsensical and dangerous for our nation’s ability to use science to protect people. Those bills required that all raw data, models, code, and other materials from scientific studies be made available to the public before EPA could use it and it had sweeping scope over EPA actions, covering “risk, exposure, or hazard assessment, criteria document, standard, limitation, regulation, regulatory impact analysis, or guidance.”
Here are the top ways EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s Trojan horse “transparency” proposal is fundamentally flawed:
It fundamentally misrepresents how science works.
You might not need a refresher on how science works, but it’s clear that Administrator does. Here’s a quick run-down: In order to […]
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Berkeley Lovelace Jr.and John W. Schoen, - CNBC
Stephan: Outside of large metropolitan areas the illness profit system that passes for healthcare in America is breaking down. There's not enough profit to be made in rural communities and since the system is not really about healthcare the obvious solution is to close down rural hospitals. Too bad about the people who live in those communities, but they are not profitable enough.
Also the immigration restrictions of the Trump administration are discouraging immigrant physicians and nurses, who are disproportionately represented at those rural hospitals, from coming to America. No wonder the U.S. healthcare outcome data is so shabby.
You want a taste of data to make sure I'm telling the truth? Just take infant and maternal mortality, and try that on for size:
The U.S. rate of 6.1 infant deaths per 1,000 live births masks considerable state-level variation. If Alabama were a country, its rate of 8.7 infant deaths per 1,000 would place it slightly behind Lebanon in the world rankings. Mississippi, with its 9.6 deaths, would be somewhere between Botswana and Bahrain.
More American women are dying of pregnancy-related complications than any other developed country. Only in the U.S. has the rate of women who die been rising. What does that look like compared to say Canada: 26.4 maternal deaths per 100,000 births. In CANADA it's 7.3 deaths per 100,000 births.
So where would you like to have your baby?
Crystal Harris was at her Virginia home one winter afternoon when she received a 911 call.
As an unpaid volunteer of the Smith River Rescue Squad in Woolwine, a small town located in northern Patrick County, Harris needed to drop what she was doing and head to the nearest ambulance station, a trip that normally takes about 10 minutes.
“Then you would respond to the house, which could take anywhere around 15 minutes,” Harris, the captain for advanced life support on the squad, told CNBC. If necessary, the rescue team would then take the patient to the nearest hospital, about 45 minutes to one hour east in Martinsville.
Harris could have taken the patient to the much closer 25-bed Pioneer Community Hospital of Patrick in Stuart, where she had been an employee before she retired. But the hospital filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and closed last year, leaving more than 100 people without a job and the roughly 19,000 residents in the surrounding community without a nearby emergency health facility.
Harris, 72, now spends most of her days responding to 911 […]
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Terry Spencer in Parkland, Florida; Jacob Jordan in Atlanta; Ed White in Detroit; Margery Beck in Omaha, Nebraska; Ben Nadler in Atlanta; and Lynn Berry in Washington, - Associated Press/WTOP
Stephan: This is what the 8 Laws of Change look like when they are put into action. Everything about this movement and this event is grounded in one of the 8 laws or another. I am in complete support of what these kids are doing.
Social change happened because of the civil rights movement, and the end of the Viet Nam war was hastened by the anti-war movement. If I were a Republican I would be deeply concerned. There is a strong anti-Reublican/anti-NRA bias, and there is no power on earth more potent than the collective intention of a multitude particularly in a democracy where people vote. This movement, as this report lays out has a very strong pro-voting activism baked in.
According to Pew Research, "Millennials are expected to overtake Boomers in population in 2019 as their numbers swell to 73 million and Boomers decline to 72 million. Generation X (ages 36 to 51 in 2016) is projected to pass theBoomers in population by 2028.
March for Our Lives, Washington, D.C.
WASHINGTON — In a historic groundswell of youth activism, hundreds of thousands of teenagers and their supporters rallied across the U.S. against gun violence Saturday, vowing to transform fear and grief into a “vote-them-out” movement and tougher laws against weapons and ammo.
They took to the streets of the nation’s capital and such cities as Boston, New York, Chicago, Houston, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Oakland, California, in the kind of numbers seen during the Vietnam era, sweeping up activists long frustrated by stalemate in the gun debate and bringing in lots of new, young voices.
They were called to action by a brand-new corps of leaders: student survivors of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead Feb. 14.
“If you listen real close, you can hear the people in power shaking,” Parkland survivor David Hogg said to roars from the protesters packing Pennsylvania Avenue from the stage near the Capitol many blocks back toward the White House. “We’re going to take this to every election, to […]
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