Here is some excellent good news. This is what the governments of the world, and certainly the United States, should be doing. Here is yet more proof that even in farming, pay close attention to the numbers cited, fostering wellbeing is better in all aspects, except the pesticide corporations that make the toxins don’t make as much profit. Boo Hoo.
Credit: Better Cotton India
It’s everyone’s favorite fabric—and over the last decade it’s become way more sustainable.
Better Cotton just published a major annual impact report highlighting significant progress in India that has slashed pesticide and water use, while making improvements to farmers’ livelihoods.
The world’s largest cotton sustainability initiative charted the performance of Indian farmers from 2014 to 2022 and found overall pesticide use decreased 53%—with water usage dropping by nearly one-third.
Enrolled in the Better Cotton Program, almost a million farmers also saw their costs reduced by 15.6% per hectare of land (equal to about 2.5 acres), since the group launched its India operation in 2011.
The report shows a dramatic reduction in the use of pesticides and highly hazardous pesticides (HHPs) by Better Cotton Farmers as a result of the adoption of capacity strengthening trainings on an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and the delivery of effective awareness campaigns.
Specifically, the number of farmers using HHPs was cut from 64% to 10%, whilst those using Monocrotophos – a pesticide classed as highly toxic by the World Health Organization – […]
Here is an interesting good news on kinds of electric vehicles one rarely sees in the U.S. but that are having a significant impact on the pollution produced by internal combustion engines.
Electric tuk-tuk in India. Credit: Corbis / Getty
The same rainstorm that earlier drowned a third of all the agricultural land and cost lives in Greece has brought incredible destruction to Libya, where at least 2,000 are thought to be dead. It’s just one in a string of deadly storms that have wracked the globe during a year that has also seen record heat, frighteningly hot oceans, and record-low ice in Antarctica.
All of this is a result of the human-made climate crisis. A U.N. report issued this week shows that in spite of significant progress, nations are falling short of the goals necessary to prevent catastrophic change that could trigger an unprecedented refugee crisis, threaten the world’s food supply, and destabilize governments around the globe. Storm clouds are right on the horizon, and the world is not moving fast enough.
The demand for EVs is accelerating in almost every area of the world. The best-selling car in the United States is an EV (though it actually comes in fifth place among passenger vehicles overall, behind four nonelectric pickups). EVs […]
A new report shows the attributes different countries value the most in kids. Credit: Klaus Vedfelt | Digitalvision | Getty
Having well-behaved kids is often a concern for parents. But not all adults in every country actually think it’s one the most important things.
Overall, adults in the U.S. are least likely to say that kids having good manners is an especially important quality — just 52% of them said so in 2017, according to a report released this monthby King’s College London. That makes the U.S. the country least likely, of the 24 countries surveyed in recent years, to believe good manners are crucial for kids.
This is a significant drop from 1990, when 76% of U.S. adults said it was a very important quality for children to possess, the data shows.
It’s also a stark contrast to the leading country, Egypt, where 96% of those surveyed said good manners should be a top parenting priority. Nigeria comes in second place with 89%, followed by Morocco with 88%.
Sixth-placed U.K. isn’t far off, with 85% saying good manners were key.
Interview with Naomi Klein, Author and Investigative Journalist - Reader Supported News
Stephan:
I agree with Naomi Klein, and think she is a very smart person, and here she gives an interview that clearly lays out what she calls the “mirror world” of conspiracies, fantasies, and misinformation. Bravo. Now will Americans do something about it when they vote?
Author and activist Naomi Klein. Credit: Sebastian Nevols / Guardian (UK)
We spend the hour with acclaimed journalist and author Naomi Klein, whose new book Doppelganger out this week explores what she calls “the mirror world,” a growing right-wing alternate universe of misinformation and conspiracies that, while identifying real problems, opportunistically exploits them to advance a hateful and divisive agenda. Klein explains her initial motivation for the book was her own alter-ego, the author Naomi Wolf, for whom she has often been mistaken. Both Naomis entered public consciousness in the 1990s with books critiquing corporate influence, but in recent years Wolf has become one of the most prominent vaccine deniers and purveyors of COVID-19 misinformation — making the ongoing confusion about their identities a source of frustration. “It’s very destabilizing,” says Klein, who still urges people to seriously engage with the dangerous ideas propagated in mirror worlds, rather than simply look away. “It’s so hard to look at the reality that we are in right now, with the overlay of endless wars and climate disasters […]
The true attitudes of the uber-rich are rarely expressed so publicly. Capitalism is a system. But it must be governed by the morality that fostering wellbeing must be the first priority. What has happened since Reagan is that it is not. Instead, we have MAGAt social policies and that has created the worse wealth inequality since the 18th century. This is part of the Great Schism Trend.
A screenshot from the now infamous interview posted by Financial Review on Twitter.
Yesterday, at a “property summit,” millionaire property developer Tim Gurner was caught on camera saying something extremely revealing. Well, he wasn’t caught. He sat on stage talking into a microphone. He said that since the start of the pandemic there has been a shift towards more worker empowerment, and even arrogance. And he wants bosses and governments to end that, expeditiously. In fact he thinks, “We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, 50 percent in my view. We need to see pain in the economy.”
His words are viscerally shocking and infuriating. But that’s not even all of it. He also commented that, “There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. So, it’s a dynamic that has to change. We’ve got to kill that attitude.” And on, and on.
The shock and anger Gurner elicits here made this moment go massively viral. […]
