Author: Adam Clare

How One Hawaiian Mayor is Making His Town Better

ocean shore
Hawaii is a beautiful part of the world and like most gorgeous parts pf this planet it’s feeling the pressures of climate change. Despite the American government’s blatant rejection of science and sense in environmental policy one Hawaiian mayor, Bernard Carvalho, is bringing his community into the 21st century. Indeed, when the American government pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord the mayors of Hawaii along with the governor committed to following the accord in their state. Over at Grist they look at what Carvalho is doing in his community, hopefully other mayors will follow his lead.

At the start of his first full term in 2010, Carvalho opened his inaugural address with a vision of a better, more livable Kauai, which he branded as Holo Holo 2020. It laid out the top priorities for the community, from economic resilience to environmental sustainability, and identified 38 projects to carry out. That included installing crosswalks, photovoltaic panels, transit infrastructure, and EV charging stations.

“A lot of this came from my going out into the community. I like to go visit people,” he says. “From these meetings came these 38 projects.”

Many are well underway, and several have been completed, including an upgrade to existing bus service and the extension of a pedestrian path that now stretches along the seashore between the towns of Kealia and Wailua. (You can see the complete list of projects here.) “All of it is tied into this bigger vision of honoring the land and the water and the environment,” Carvalho says.

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Tough Lobbying Rules in Ireland Work Well

Ten years ago when a bunch of bankers greatly damaged the economy the country of Ireland suffered quite a bit. The people of Ireland made the connection between influence on politicians from large corporations on poor public policy – thus they changed the rules on how the private sector can influence the public sector. The rues now put in place are appearing to rebuild trust in politicians, and the other countries are now looking at following Ireland’s lead.

The Irish reforms are simple. Any individual, company or NGO that seeks to directly or indirectly influence officials on a policy issue must list themselves on a public register and disclose any lobbying activity. The rules cover any meeting with high-level public officials, as well as letters, emails or tweets intended to influence policy.

For those in the business, the impact of the register and its requirements are primarily about the way the industry is perceived — and, broadly, they’re happy about it.

“I’ve not heard anybody suggest the Lobbying Act has impacted in any way the willingness or the ability to influence [policymakers],” said Conall McDevitt, CEO of Hume Brophy, one of Ireland’s largest lobbying firms. “It’s always better in our industry to have transparency, we’re all the stronger for it.”

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Saving the Ozone Layer Helped More Than We Thought


It turns out when nations of the world get together to try and save the environment they can be really good at it. The Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987 to save the ozone layer, and it did. Indeed, a new report says that it not only saved the ozone layer the protocol also cut greenhouse gas emissions. This meant that nations that signed the protocol had a spin-off benefit of reducing their nation’s carbon footprint.

Great things can happen if the politicians of our world work together.

Under the Montreal Protocol—which was enforced by the EPA’s Clean Air Act—the US saw a a near-complete phaseout of CFCs beginning in 1996, and a 95 percent decline in HCFCs since 1998. Pulling data from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration’s atmospheric monitoring network, Lei Hu from the University of Colorado Boulder and her colleagues demonstrated that from 2008 to 2014, the elimination of these substances had the equivalent climate impact of reducing CO2 emissions by 170 million tons per year. Projecting forward, the researchers found that the continued implementation of the Montreal Protocol and its amendments could shave some 500 million tons of CO2 off our carbon footprint annually by 2025, compared with 2005 emissions levels.

 For context, 500 million tons of CO2 is roughly a quarter of what we need to cut to meet our Paris Climate Agreement target, of reducing emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025. It’s also close to the annual US emissions from the entire agriculture sector.

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Using Drones to Plant Entire Forests

When drones are brought up in the news it’s usually because they are used to kill, here’s a story about drones bringing life. A company, BioCarbon Engineering, has demonstrated how to se drones to plant forests more efficiently than other methods.

It’s a rather simple process with incredibly complex software: send one drone to survey the planting site then send a second drone towrope seeds. The seeds will only be dropped in areas marked with good growth potential. Of course, this approach is a reaction to deforestation, it would be even more efficient to stop deforestation before it happens. Still, faster regrowth is better than slow to no regrowth of forests.

Here’s a video of the drones in operation:

The drones, from the startup BioCarbon Engineering, can plant as many as 100,000 trees in a single day, leaving the local community to focus on taking care of the young trees that have already started to grow. In September, the company will begin a drone-planting program in the area along with Worldview International Foundation, the nonprofit guiding local tree-planting projects. To date, the organization has worked with villagers to plant an area of 750 hectares, about twice the size of Central Park; the drones will help cover another 250 hectares with 1 million additional trees. Ultimately, the nonprofit hopes to use drones to help plant 1 billion trees in an even larger area.

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Doctors Love Bike Lanes

The new Canadian organization, Doctors for Safe Cycling, clearly loves bicycles. Based on their name alone you would think that they advocate for better bicycling infrastructure for cyclists, but they argue that bike lanes are good for everyone. Indeed, regular readers of good news already know that bike lanes make cities better, healthier, places. Maybe your doctor will soon be prescribing you a bicycle to commute on!

Cycling is beneficial to many aspects of health. A study published in the prestigious British Medical Journal in April 2017 showed some remarkable outcomes: people who cycle to work have a much lower risk of getting heart disease (by 50 per cent), of getting cancer ( by 40 per cent) and of dying of any cause ( by 40 per cent). Other studies have reached similar conclusions.

Of course the benefits are not restricted to cyclists themselves. As we move folks from four wheels to two we also improve air quality and tackle climate change – which is a boon to everyone.

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