Stephan: As we come to the end of the year I think we should be aware of some good news about what has happened to advance clean non-carbon energy. We are not fully converted, but things are getting better.
A large array of solar panels, located one hour north of Los Angeles in Kern County, is viewed on Nov. 15, 2022, near Mojave, California. Credit: George Rose / Getty
You can forgive people who work on U.S. energy policy for being tired this month. They have just sprinted, and sometimes slogged, through an extraordinary year of action and progress at the federal, state and local levels.
“It’s been a big one, for sure,” said Autumn Proudlove, associate director for policy and markets at the N.C. Clean Technology Center at North Carolina State University.
Not just a big one, but maybe the biggest one ever in terms of the number and scope of new laws and rules, she said.
Here are some of the key developments:
The Inflation Reduction Act: President Biden signed this measure in August following more than a year of ups and downs as Democrats tried to coalesce around a proposal that could pass the House and Senate.
The law’s climate and energy provisions include about $370 billion in new spending on an array of tax credits and incentives designed to encourage the development […]
Deepa Parent and Ghoncheh Habibiazad, - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: All over the world there is a major trend underway; it is particularly intense and active in the Islamic world and in the United States. What is it? A militant attempt to keep women a subordinate gender. Nowhere is this clearer than in Iran where, as this article describes, the police are deliberately trying to shoot women in their groin so that their genitals are damaged. The good news about this trend though is that the women are winning. In spite of the hysteria, particularly by patriarchal religious movements, I think, the 21st century will stand out as the century where gender equality became a reality. If you look at countries governed by women, for instance, you see clearly that they have better-functioning governments and policies than the previous men, and that they tend to foster wellbeing. Voters in those countries -- Iceland, The Marshall Islands, New Zealand, Namibia, Bangladesh,Nepal, Estonia, Croatia, Norway, Ethiopia, Taiwan, Lithuania -- seem to be understanding this.
A protest in Tehran days after the death of Mahsa Amini. One medic said he treated a woman ‘deliberately’ shot in the genitals and thighs. Credit: Social media /Rex / Shutterstock
Iranian security forces are targeting women at anti-regime protests with shotgun fire to their faces, breasts and genitals, according to interviews with medics across the country.
Doctors and nurses – treating demonstrators in secret to avoid arrest – said they first observed the practice after noticing that women often arrived with different wounds to men, who more commonly had shotgun pellets in their legs, buttocks and backs.
While an internet blackout has hidden much of the bloody crackdown on protesters, photos provided by medics to the Guardian showed devastating wounds all over their bodies from so-called birdshot pellets, which security forces have fired on people at close range. Some of the photos showed people with dozens of tiny “shot” balls lodged deep in their flesh.
The Guardian has spoken to 10 medical professionals who warned about the seriousness of the injuries that could leave hundreds of young Iranians with […]
Mark Bittman, Faculty of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: When I go to Costco on the mainland, as we do about every five or six weeks, and walk around, I am always struck by the fact that about 60% of the men and women I see are obese. When you travel in Europe or Asia the easiest way to identify Americans is their obesity. Clearly there is something about the American diet that is different than the diet of other countries. Why is this the American reality? The answer I think is described in this article. Like everything else in the United States, the food industry is grounded in profit, not wellbeing, and we, as individuals, have to change it. Look at your eating practices and ask yourself, what could I change that would make me healthier?
Diet-related chronic disease is the perennial number one killer in the United States, responsible for more deaths than Covid-19 even at the pandemic’s peak. Yet we cannot manage to define this as a “crisis”. In fact, our response is lame: for decades we’ve been telling people to “eat better”, a strategy that hasn’t worked, and never will.
It cannot, as long as the majority of calories we produce are unhealthy. It is the availability of and access to types of food that determines our diets, and those, in turn, are factors of agricultural policy. For a healthy population, we must mandate or at least incentivize growing real food for nutrition, not cheap meat and corn and soya beans for junk food.
As omnivores, humans have choices, but most choices available to Americans are bad ones. Literally: 60% of the calories in the food supply are in the form of ultra-processed foods (UPFs, or junk food), which are the primary cause of diet-related diseases. That means almost no one can make a “good” choice every time, and many of us can barely […]
Stephan: Here is some good news. In spite of all the resistance on the part of the carbon energy industries the world is making progress in exiting the carbon era. Here is the International Energy Agency's take on this.
Energy efficiency actions have accelerated globally in 2022 as governments and consumers have increasingly turned to efficiency measures as part of their responses to fuel supply disruptions and record-high energy prices, indicating a potential turning point after several years of slow progress.
Global investments in energy efficiency – such as building renovations, public transport and electric car infrastructure – reached USD 560 billion in 2022, an increase of 16% on 2021, according to the IEA’s latest market report, Energy Efficiency 2022.
Preliminary data indicate that in 2022 the global economy used energy 2% more efficiently than it did in 2021, a rate of improvement almost four times that of the past two years, and almost double the rate of the past five years. If the current rate of progress can be built upon further in the coming years, then 2022 could mark a vital turning point for efficiency, which is one of the key areas for international efforts to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
The IEA analysis found that, thanks to energy efficiency actions taken since […]
The loan from Daewoo may have represented a conflict of interest. Credit: Mark Wilson / Getty
Donald Trump failed to disclose a $19.8m loan from a company with historical ties to North Korea, while he was the US president, according to a new report.
Documents obtained by the New York attorney general, and reported by Forbes, on Sunday indicate a previously unreported loan owed by Trump to Daewoo, the South Korean conglomerate.
Daewoo was the only South Korean company allowed to operate a business in North Korea during the mid-1990s.
Forbes revealed that Trump’s relationship with Daewoo is at least 25 years old. At one point, Daewoo partnered with Trump on a development project near the United Nations headquarters in New York City, Trump World Tower.
Trump and Daewoo continued to do business together, including using Trump’s name on six South Korea-based properties from 1999 to 2007, according to the magazine.
The outlet reports that the debt in question “stems from an agreement Trump struck to share some of his licensing fees with Daewoo”.
