Save the Grocery Store, Save the Town

- Adam Clare

beans
When markets fail people, then the people need to replace the market. Ir, to put it more directly: when a profitable grocery store isn’t profitable enough for a company then small towns need to buy that grocery store and turn it into a publicly owned asset which keeps the community alive. That’s what small towns in the USA are starting to do. By saving their local, downtown, grocery stores they keep people employed, returning to the town, and overall make life easier for everyone. The future of America might be the small box store.

The city hadn’t had a full-scale grocery store since 1985, and Giefer decided to change that. In 2008, he used city funding to get a new store, St. Paul Supermarket, off the ground. In 2013, when the couple who ran the store was staring down retirement, Giefer convinced the city to buy it outright.

In 2019, Schoenhofer drove to St. Paul to meet with that city’s clerk, who gave her some tips. The experiment, Schoenhofer found, had been a success. The St. Paul grocery employs ~15 people, and it turns a profit of 3%, slightly better than the average for rural grocery stores.

It has also kept people — and spending money — in town. Similarly, in Erie, residents show up to Erie Market for fresh lunches, like a BBQ pulled-pork sandwich or a taco on Taco Tuesday.

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France Pays People to Stop Driving and Start Riding

- Adam Clare
a couple, bicycles

Car drivers take up way more road space than they need since the size of their vehicles are disproportionate to their usefulness. Smart countries aim to limit the number of single occupant vehicles on the road for this reason and to ensure that all people can easily get from one place to the next. Traffic is so bad in some places that countries, like France, are now paying people to give up on their car.

France is working hard to push urban drivers out of cars and towards smaller and more environmentally responsible forms of transportation. In large cities like Paris, reduction in traffic from a switch to bicycles and scooters is perhaps just as important to many residents as the environmental effects.

We recently covered the case of an electric bicycle company that is switching from vans to cargo e-bikes to increase the number of electric bikes it could deliver each day. The company’s delivery vans were simply too slow in Paris traffic, and switching to cargo e-bikes will help ramp up deliveries by using smaller, quicker, and more efficient vehicles.

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Open Source Tracking of Fossil Fuels Companies

- Adam Clare
industry

Information is power, and the fossil fuel companies don’t want anyone but them to have power. They have lied to governments, manipulated political parties, and publicly deny their actions are killing all of us. Obviously, that’s not good.

Now an international team of researchers and concerned organizations have launched the Global Registry of Fossil Fuels to track the work of companies which are actively extracting deadly fuels. The goal is to help decision makers from local politicians to CEOs understand the dangers of the industry and explain plainly what harm they are doing.

Countries around the world are projected to produce more than twice the fossil fuels consistent with 1.5°C by 2030. It is clear that addressing the climate crisis requires managing the supply of fossil fuels, alongside demand-side measures, and that this needs to be done fairly and equitably. The Global Registry of Fossil Fuels is therefore the first the first-ever comprehensive, independent, policy neutral and fully open-source database that demonstrates the scale of CO2 emissions associated with each country’s national reserves and production, thus enabling policy-makers, investors and others to make informed decisions to align fossil fuel production with 1.5°C, and equipping researchers with the data needed to provide timely analysis.

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Therapy + Cash = Lower Crime

- Adam Clare


It’s a simple equation which may sound obvious to some and bizarre to others. Our current approach to crime focusses on punishment and repression, and that clearly doesn’t work given our current incarceration and recidivism rates. The good news is that simply providing people with a minimum amount to live on while also providing therapy is far cheaper and far better at dealing with crime. Instead of waiting for even more evidence that this approach works, let’s get it moving now.

A month after the intervention, both the therapy group and the therapy-plus-cash group were showing positive results. A year after the intervention, the positive effects on those who got therapy alone had faded a bit, but those who got therapy plus cash were still showing huge impacts: crime and violence were down about 50 percent.

But Blattman didn’t dare to hope that this impact would persist. Experts he surveyed predicted that the effects would steeply diminish over the years, as they do in many interventions.

So it was a great surprise when, 10 years later, he tracked down the original men from the study and reevaluated them. Amazingly, crime and violence were still down by about 50 percent in the therapy-plus-cash group.

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Patagonia Billionaire Donates Company to Fighting Climate Change

- Adam Clare
tree with climate knowledge

The family who owned the Patagonia clothing company recently gave the company to a new trust which will take all the profits and dedicate it to fighting climate change. Meaning that the $3 billion company will now spend the $100 million in profits it generates annually on good things. The billionaire family hopes that their action will inspire other insanely wealthy people to do the same with their companies.

“Hopefully this will influence a new form of capitalism that doesn’t end up with a few rich people and a bunch of poor people,” Mr. Chouinard, 83, said in an exclusive interview. “We are going to give away the maximum amount of money to people who are actively working on saving this planet.”

Patagonia will continue to operate as a private, for-profit corporation based in Ventura, Calif., selling more than $1 billion worth of jackets, hats and ski pants each year. But the Chouinards, who controlled Patagonia until last month, no longer own the company.

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