Wednesday 23 October 2024

Reasons To Be Cheerful In A Scary World

The World can be a scary place, from the climate crisis to wars, there is always something to keep us fretting but hang on, what are the reasons to be cheerful to balance things out a little?
We may hear much of a divide between the left and the right and that may be good business for some politicians, British social attitudes are vastly improving with a 2022 Survey finding that 73% of people thought rights for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals 'had not gone far enough', 49% of people agreed that equal rights 'had not gone far enough' for Black and Asian people while same sex weddings have been made legal in Bulgaria, Estonia, Peru, Hong Kong, Romania and Thailand.
Regarding Climate Change, the world has made significant progress with worldwide spending on carbon-free energy reaching £785bn which means that for the first time ever, we have spent as much on clean energy as we did on fossil fuels and renewables now supply a quarter of US electricity and projected to be as much as 90% by 2030 as attitudes shift to stemming climate change and wanting to make all our lives better.
More people are becoming resistant to online conspiracy theories and misinformation, Alzheimer’s treatment which is being called  'the beginning of the end of dementia' has finished trials with a resounding success and AI has been dramatically speeding up scientific discovery of new drugs for Cancer and Tuberculosis treatment and Polio is all but eradicated.
Inflation is down from a high of 11% in 2022 to 2% today and the pay gap between full-time working women and their male counterparts is the smallest on record while electric car ownership is up 50% and more manufacturers are going down the route of Electric cars which are becoming cheaper which all helps the Ozone Layer which continues to heal and is expected to return to normal levels by about 2050.
The number of people in extreme poverty is on the way down with 80 million less than four years ago and a hundred countries now ban plastics with the EU banning the export of plastic waste and under Brazil's new President, deforestation in the Amazon is at the lowest level it's been in five years and animals such as the African Elephant and lion, the American bison and Bald eagle, the blue whale and the humpback whale, the monarch butterfly, the mountain gorilla, the grey wolf, the sea otter, the snow leopard have all been taken off the WWFs endangered list and put on the recovery list thanks to conservation efforts.
Yes, us humans can be awful and you only have to watch an episode of any news channel to see that but taking a page from Ian Dury, there are some reasons to be cheerful.

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