99 good news stories from 2022
Rampant inflation, volatile global economies, and supply chain issues. Protests in Iran and China, war in Europe, and a tense American political landscape. Extreme weather events all over the globe. Britain went through three prime ministers in short order, the crypto world melted down, and we had a monkeypox outbreak on top of the Covid-19 pandemic.

That’s one summary of how 2022 went. As a reader of The Progress Network (TPN), though, you know that there are other ones to choose from. 2022 was also a year of “uplifting human rights victories, extraordinary conservation wins, big milestones in global health and development, and an unprecedented acceleration in the clean energy transition.” That’s how our partner Future Crunch put it in our collaborative roundup of 99 of the best good news stories from 2022. Read them all here, and end up like this guy:

For a preview, here are my personal five favorites from the list:

1. After decades of stalemate, the gun safety debate looks like it might finally have shifted this year. The United States Congress took its first significant act on gun safety in nearly three decades in 2022, 45 new gun safety laws were adopted in states, and 95 percent of gun-lobby-linked bills were blocked.

2. Poland welcomed over two million Ukrainian refugees with open arms this year. Private citizens spent $2.1 billion on aid, the government spent $3.4 billion, and 1.2 million Ukrainians were granted access to health care, education, and social benefits. Attitudes changed too. Eighty percent of Poles now support taking in refugees fleeing violence and war, up from 49 percent in 2018.

3. Covid vaccines prevented 19.8 million deaths during 2021. India averted the most deaths at 4.2 million, followed by the United States at 1.9 million and Brazil at just over a million.

4. After three decades of inaction, the US passed its first ever comprehensive climate bill in 2022, containing $369 billion in spending. It was the most significant climate news since China announced its net-zero target, and in its aftermath, analysts started predicting "staggering" amounts of clean energy deployment, with wind, solar, and batteries accounting for over 95 percent of capacity in US interconnection queues.

5. UNICEF reported some welcome news on global child mortality. The pandemic did not result in the feared reversal—rather, child mortality has actually decreased to its lowest level ever, at 37 deaths per 1,000 live births. Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and India have all reported significant declines in the last few years.

Make sure to take a look at the whole list, and send it around to any grinches you know who need cheering up. It’s just the festive palate cleanser we need to move with bright spirits into the new year.

Follow-ups on three TPN newsletter topics this year
 Artificial intelligence (AI) experts see the problem of distinguishing human versus AI-produced text, and they’re working on a fix.

We’re slowly unwinding the effects of the War on Drugs, from lower incarceration rates to closing racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Now US Attorney General Merrick Garland has “instructed federal prosecutors to end charging and sentencing disparities in cases involving the distribution of crack and powder cocaine.” The Washington Post on why that’s another step forward here. 

 It might interest you to know that many countries around the world, from South Korea to Israel to Sweden, think that social media has been good for democracy, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center. The US is a big anomaly, where 79 percent of American respondents think that the Internet and social media have “made people more divided in their political opinions, the highest percentage among the 19 countries polled.” Why the US is such an outlier is a meaty question to chew over.

Before we go
Pair the good news with this slightly wacky, funny, but ultimately powerful list of underrated reasons to be thankful. The first one: “that when cyanobacteria arose 2 billion years ago and filled the atmosphere with oxygen which killed off most species and removed methane from the air so temperatures crashed and the entire planet was encased in ice, this didn’t quite extinguish all life but eventually led to the rise of eukaryotes that turn oxygen back into carbon dioxide and later those eukaryotes banded together into multicellular teams like you.” Totally.

If you miss us over the holiday break, try some of our best-received podcast episodes of 2022. On the What Could Go Right? show this year, we've had a Republican and a Democrat come together to talk about why politics is like pro wrestling, Arthur Brooks on the path to purpose, meaning, love, and contentment, and Tyler Cowen on why he thinks that the “world has never been more optimistic than it is now.”

Happy holidays, and we’ll see you in the new year. 

Below in the links section, sewer-diving robots, gene-edited hens, media-literate kindergartners, and more.
 

—Emma Varvaloucas

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