Hawaii leads the way with renewable energy AND universal basic income

One of the positive benefits of having such an absurdly regressive federal government in place right now is that it has spurred the states to take matters into their own hands. This, of course, is closer to what the US was founded on, and throughout its history the states have often pioneered initiatives that have then spread nationally.

So, Hawaii is going nuts right now. Not one but TWO amazing explorations.

First there's Universal Basic Income. This is an idea that's been picking up speed recently. It's not that Hawaii has suddenly implemented it, but they've become the first state to start evaluating what it would mean and what it would take to put it in place. You can read more here about Hawaii's steps, and about the fascinating concept of UBI in general.

Then there's energy. The Hawaii legislature right now is considering a bill that would require all transportation in the Aloha state to run on renewable energy by 2045. Hawaii's climate is very sensitive to the changes from climate change, and because of their remote location they also spend billions on imported oil. This push would address both those major issues.

And that's just ground transportation. A bill is already in law in the state that all electricity must be generated by renewable means by 2045. The law passed last July. With an abundance of water and a sunny environment, Hawaii is primed to harness renewable energy in many ways.

Even better, officials in the state say that the goal could actually be reached ahead of schedule, as early as 2040. Personally, I think it will be sooner, as it's hard to accurately predict and account for the snowballing effects of leaps in technology.

Read more here om Global Citizen.

The innovation of green roofs

I've been in the Javits Center a ton of times (yes, mostly for Comic-Con) but never knew they had implemented a green roof a few years back. Our NYC apartment actually looks down on a really cool green roof, of the new Stuyvesant Town management office. Check out this NPR video to see how turning roofs green can benefit cities in lots of surprising ways.

Looking at life expectancy in detail

The New York Times published this U.S. life expectancy chart in an article a year ago:

In my book, I had published a similar chart showing the shrinking life expectancy gap between classes in Britain, and we see the same trend here. The gap between white and black life expectancy in the U.S. is now 3.4 years, down from 7 in 1990, and even wider going back farther.

While the article highlights a lot of interesting small trends, and the current patterns, my book prefers to look at larger trends. And it's not hard to see what's going on here, in the 116 years shown. In 1900, whites had a life expectancy of about 50, and blacks about 35. Today, that's 79 and 75.6.

What's incredible to me is how little the world's largest events matter in the long term. Look at the trauma of 1918. It was a terrible time for millions of people, but in terms of life expectancy, it didn't stop the trend from continuing right back up as if the Spanish Flu and WWI had never happened. Same thing for WWII, the Great Depression, and Vietnam. On this chart - obviously removed from the terrible human impact on the millions of people it represents - those were all just blips temporarily slowing down an unstoppable trend./p>

Tesla finishes its positive feedback loop

I recently finished the Elon Musk biography, and I recommend it to everyone to understand what I think is perhaps the most innovative and positive trend happening in this country today, at a time when many other trends seem to be heading backwards.

This video introduces Tesla's new solar roof panels. These are ingenious. Tesla has solved the main drawback of solar panels on people's roofs: They're ugly. Not these - they blend in as regular roofs while also looking even more beautiful.

The positive energy flywheel that the company has created takes energy from the sun through the roof tiles, stores it in Tesla's home batteries, and then charges its cars from the batteries. That leaves us with perfectly renewable energy powering the cars, with zero emissions. Watch the video below to find out more.

More and more of the world is protected

I looked at the stats of how much of the world was protected in my 2010 book, The Secret Peace, and that trend has continued. Today, almost 13% of all the world's land is officially protected, according to the World Bank.

That may not sound like a lot, but it's 25 million square miles, and more importantly, it's up from only 6% in 1990.

What's interesting too is to see the breakdown by country. Some have made incredible strides, and nearly EVERY ONE has made gains since 1990. Below is a sample of several countries I found exceptional, with some of the most impressive gains.

These trends are likely to continue, slow but steady. However, I think we're on the cusp of several technological breakthroughs that could accelerate them even more. Consider the following clues:

1. Online shopping is replacing a lot of retail stores, especially big malls. This requires warehouses, but those take up less room than retail.
2. 3D printing may lead to more goods being produced on demand as they're ordered, eliminating the need for storing excess goods. This is already true of print-on-demand books.
3. When self-driving cars take off, they will eventually start replacing car ownership. People will be able to call a car, just like Lyft or Uber, at a lower cost since there are no drivers. These cars will not need to rest and can function 24 hours a day (perhaps shipping goods when passenger demand is low). We start to need fewer and fewer parking spaces. New shopping centers and offices will be built with numbered drop-off points, rather than huge parking lots.
4. In addition, if Amazon succeeds at using delivery drones at scale, that's even fewer trucks on the road.
5. Thanks to Tesla, energy-efficient electric cars will soon expand to a massive scale. Since these cars will also have the ability to be self-driving, even if that's not "turned on" yet, it will accelerate the switch to self-driving cars.
6. As they have for 200 years, crops will continue to get more efficient and produce higher yields, accelerated by more acceptance of GMOs, finally.
7. Vegetarianism has been another slow-burning trend in the developed world, and as the world eats less meat, less land is needed for livestock, which is much less efficient than crops.
8. And even though the developing world is eating more meat, lab-grown meat is on the cusp of being released commercially. If it takes a while to catch on with consumers used to "real" meat, that might not be the case with other, newly meat-eating consumers. Lab-grown meat is real meat, indistinguishable from other meat, but using a lot fewer resources to produce and not harming any animals, to boot.

Those are all trends leading to less and less land needed by humans and their voracious needs. This frees up more land that, even if not officially preserved yet, may start to revert to a natural state. It'll be interesting to continue to track these trends in the years to come.

A controversial suggestion: Let's stop hitting children

Good-bye, spanking. Like all types of violence throughout the world, the physical discipline of children is declining.

In the United States, for example, 94 percent of parents endorsed hitting kids in 1968, but only one-half approved by 1999. Similar decreases occurred in countries as diverse as Austria, Sweden, Kuwait, Germany, and New Zealand. (In Sweden, the drop preceded the law against hitting kids.)

Why is this? The author of this Slate article posits that it's due to increased education, specifically education and tactics now more widely disseminated on the most effective ways to parent. This is good, because, lest anyone still think otherwise, we now have reams of evidence that spanking and physical punishment backfires spectacularly.

For example, in The Week from May 13, 2016, it mentions that a new metastudy "has found physical discipline actually makes children more defiant and more likely to have later alcohol, drug, and mental health problems. After examining the findings of 75 studies involving more than 160,000 children, a team of researchers found that children who are routinely disciplined with an open-handed smack on the bottom - a spanking - have behavior problems similar to those of children who are physically abused. In fact, the more kids are spanked, the more likely they are to develop low self-esteem and become aggressive, antisocial, and rebellious, the meta-analysis reveals. "Spanking does the opposite of what parents usually want it to do," the study's co-author says."

The article went on to conclude, "The researchers suggest that parents use non-physical forms of discipline, and rely on positive reinforcement of desirable behavior, which research shows is far more effective than punishment."

Here is a picture of my child, who has never been spanked:

Other sources:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/27/the-connections-between-spanking-and-aggression

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/04/spanking.aspx

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-hitting-a-child-as-a-form-of-discipline-considered-a-thing-to-despise-in-the-West/answer/Andrew-Weill

Kids these days ... have better hearing?

Do you wear headphones or earbuds? Are you concerned at all about their effect on your hearing? Maybe somewhere in the back of your mind you remember that they're bad?

Well, despite recent fears over increased headphone use, not to mention loud concerts and movies, not to mention urban life and honking and who knows what else, hearing loss is actually declining in the U.S.

As the New York Times, reports, "The paper, published in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology — Head & Neck Surgery, used data from the National Health and Nutrition Survey, which periodically administers health tests to a representative sample of the population. The investigators ... compared data collected between 1999 and 2004 with data from 2011 and 2012, the most recent available."

What's impressive is not only did hearing loss decrease from 15.9% of the population to 14.1% in less than a decade - that's 5 million people fewer - but that this is part of a continuing trend since the 1950s.

Read more here.