Here is some good news for California. I hope other states will soon follow suit. This is the sort of wellbeing fostering decision politicians ought to be making, and so few do.
A plastic bag sits along a roadside in Sacramento, California. Credit: Rich Pedroncelli / AP
“Paper or plastic” will no longer be a choice at grocery store checkout lines in California under a new law signed on Sunday by the governor, Gavin Newsom, that bans all plastic shopping bags.
California had already banned thin plastic shopping bags at supermarkets and other stores, but shoppers could purchase bags made with a thicker plastic that purportedly made them reusable and recyclable.
The new measure, approved by state legislators last month, bans all plastic shopping bags starting in 2026. Consumers who don’t bring their own bags will now simply be asked if they want a paper bag.
State senator Catherine Blakespear, one of the bill’s supporters, said people were not reusing or recycling any plastic bags. She pointed to a state study that found that the amount of plastic shopping bags trashed a person grew from 8lb (3.6kg) a year in 2004 to 11lb a year in 2021.
Blakespear, a Democrat from Encinitas, said the previous bag ban passed a decade ago didn’t reduce the overall use of plastic.
A few months ago, I bought a Hewlett-Packard (HP) printer. Somehow in what I thought was registering the printer with HP I became embroiled in the HP Instant Ink program. What I did not know was that this program allows HP to monitor your printer via the internet and record how many pages you print — and who knows what else — and you get charged for each printed page, and have to pay a fee depending on how many pages you have printed. Ostensibly, this is about being sent ink, but I never got any ink. However, when I needed ink I discovered I was faced with a fee of $36.95, based on how many pages I had printed. When I asked how they could possibly know that I learned about the monitoring. I also discovered that I had been involved in the Instant Ink Program when I thought I was registering my printer for its warranty. I immediately asked to be removed from this program, only to discover that they controlled my printer and I could no longer print unless I agreed to re-enroll in the Instant Ink Program. I want to warn any reader that if you buy an HP printer you may find yourself embroiled in this scam. As I was writing this I thought that I couldn’t be the only person who has had this experience and searched to see. It turns out that Hewlett-Packard Instant Ink has been the focus of multiple class action lawsuits.
We are mid-way into a take over of democracies by corporate oligarchs as this research report describes. In the United States nothing is going to stop this but a massive citizen uprising reflected in how people vote and how they demand their their politicians peform, starting with eliminating the Electoral College, adding four uncorrupt justices to the Supreme Court committed to fair and ethical judicial decisions, establishing a Supreme Court code of ethics overseen by a nonpolitical oversight committee, establishing a tenurre of 18 years. Also making all elections publicly funded, and making it illegal for any politician or their PACs to receive any form of financial support. Can we get there? To be honest I’m not sure. A lot is going to depend on how you and everyone you know votes for Democrats. But that is just the start.
As an estimated four billion people vote to elect new governments in a historic year for democracy, trade unions are campaigning For Democracy at work, in societies, and in global institutions.
The Seven Corporations Actively Seeking to Sabotage Democracy
Millions of workers have already mobilised for policy change and in the run-up to political elections. They have organised to expand worker power or took militant strike action on the job. Around the world, they are fighting for a vision of “democracy in which workers set the course in our communities, workplaces, countries, and international institutions together.”
This far-reaching campaign now places its focus on high-level global institutions, where government delegations negotiate key standards, treaties, and goals that effectively shape the world of work and thereby all of human society.
When governments gather in New York, USA, for the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) and Summit of the Future (SOTF), in Washington, USA, for the Annual Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), […]
Here is further confirmation of the point the previous article reported. Unless you are a millionaire you are becoming a financial peasant in a neo-medieval financial culture.
A report published Monday by the humanitarian group Oxfam warns that decades of intensifying inequality have left the world in the grip of a “global oligarchy” under which the richest sliver of humanity owns more wealth than nearly everyone else combined—a state of affairs that undermines democratic institutions and international cooperation on climate, pandemics, and other crises.
Oxfam’s analysis of data from the investment banking giant UBS found that the fortune controlled by the top 1% is now larger than the collective wealth of the bottom 95%.
Such inequality pervades the global economy, Oxfam noted, with a small number of corporations dominating key sectors. Nearly half of the global seed market, for example, is controlled by just two corporations, Bayer and Corteva. At the same time, just three U.S.-based financial behemoths—Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard—oversee nearly 20% of the world’s investable assets, around $20 trillion.
What’s more, such massive corporations are increasingly run by billionaires: According to Oxfam, a billionaire either heads or is the top shareholder of more than a third of the world’s leading 50 corporations.
JONATHAN MINGLE , Contributing Writer - Yale Environment 360
Stephan:
Here is some good news about school buses; they are becoming EVs. Slowly local school systems are beginning to awaken to the air pollution their carbon-powered transportation system produces.
About 20 million students in the United States ride to school each day on the familiar yellow bus. The vast majority of the nation’s roughly 490,000 school buses — which comprise the nation’s largest public-transportation fleet — are powered by diesel engines. “We’re poisoning our kids on the way to school,” said Jessica Keithan, cofounder and director of the Texas Electric School Bus Project, of the exhaust that inevitably infiltrates bus interiors and children’s lungs.
But that’s slowly beginning to change. Thanks to a slate of federal and state incentive programs, school districts all over the country are starting to swap out old diesel buses for new, zero-emissions electric-powered models.
This transition is reaching districts of all sizes and demographics, from Martinsville Independent School District in East Texas — which last year became the first in the country to go fully electric with four new buses — to Oakland Unified School District in California — which last month became the first large urban district to fully electrify its fleet, with 74 buses.
As the Environmental Protection Agency, through its $5 billion […]
Here is some more good news. Contrary to what virtually every MAGAt Republican campaigning says, the murder rate actually went down last year. We are still the worse developed nation in the world — except for countries like Ukraine that are in active wars — for gun deaths. And death by gun fire is still the leading cause of death for young people in the U.S. But as the FBI reports things are getting slightly better. There is so much more that could be done to lower this death rate still further, but this is still good news.
Federal Bureau of Investigation seal in Washington DC on 12 July. Credit NurPhoto / Getty
Murder dropped by more than 11% from 2022 to 2023, the largest single-year decline in two decades, according to FBI data released on Monday.
Meanwhile, the broader category of violent crime nationwide decreased about 3%, said the data, which is audited and confirms earlier reporting from unaudited statistics.
Monday’s release of audited data contradicts a talking point that Donald Trump has made on the campaign trail as the Republican presidential nominee seeks a return to the White House during the 5 November election: that crime has been rampant and out of control without him in power.
In its annual Crime in the Nation summary, the FBI said rape decreased by an estimated 9.4%, property crime dropped 2.4% and burglary fell by an estimated 7.6%.
Car theft, however, was up by an estimated 12.6% – and shoplifting had returned to levels seen before the Covid-19 pandemic, from 999,394 reported cases in 2022 to 1.15m in 2023.
The crime agency notes that its 2023 estimates include full-year numbers from “every city agency covering a population […]
