Every day the Good Good Good team collects the best good news in the world and shares it with our community. Here are the highlights for this week!
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The Best Positive News We’re Celebrating This Week —
Norway is on track to be the first country to eliminate diesel and petrol car sales — and did it without banning them
In 2024, nine out of 10 new cars sold in Norway were fully battery-powered — putting the country on track to only add new electric cars to its roadways by 2025.
Fully electric cars accounted for 88.9% of new cars sold last year, up from 82.4% in 2023 — led primarily by Tesla, Volkswagen, and Toyota.
Notably, the country achieved this milestone without adding any ban on combustion-engine cars. Acknowledging that “people don’t like to be told what to do,” the country instead heavily incentivized purchases of electric vehicles and imposed higher taxes on diesel and petrol cars.
Why is this good news? While decarbonizing the transportation industry must also involve public transit and alternative forms of transportation, moving away from combustion engine personal vehicles is also essential to reducing planet-warming emissions. Norway is giving us all a glimpse of an emission-free future.
Access to abortion care has improved globally in the last three decades
Over 20 years ago, the World Health Organization noticed high maternal mortality rates in places around the world — many of those deaths were due to unsafe abortions. And where abortion was highly restricted — maternal mortality rates from unsafe abortion were high.
As a result, it recommended removing barriers to accessing abortion as a key part of basic health care in order to reduce death and improve reproductive health outcomes.
While a handful of countries have added restrictions to accessing abortion care, like the United States — far more have followed those guidelines and improved access to care.
Sixty countries total have improved access in the past 30 years, while just four have further restricted access. Among those with improved access, the quality and safety of abortion care has also improved — and maternal health along with it.
President Biden banned new offshore oil and gas drilling in most US coastal waters
Responding to calls from coastal communities around the U.S., President Biden used his authority under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to ban new offshore drilling for oil and gas in almost all U.S. coastal waters.
The move will protect offshore areas along the East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and parts of Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea from future oil and gas leasing projects. Because of the nature of the ban, experts say it would be challenging to reverse in the future.
The order does not impact large portions of the Gulf of Mexico, where the majority of drilling already occurs.
Why is this good news? The incoming presidential administration has stated its plans to expand offshore drilling, and this move from the outgoing administration will protect more waters from that fate.
Expanding drilling would be detrimental not only to the climate crisis at large, but to marine and coastal ecosystems, coastal communities (and their local economies), and the people (and future generations) who call these places home. It’s also unnecessary, as we continue to exponentially invest in a clean energy economy that’s better and healthier for people and the planet.
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A 12-year-old girl in Scotland designed a solar-powered sleeping bag for her homeless neighbors
The Primary Engineer MacRobert Medal competition asks UK students: “If you were an engineer, what would you do?”
And, seeing “so many people sleeping rough on the streets of Glasgow,” 12-year-old Rebecca Young knew: she wanted to help members of her community facing homelessness.
So, the Scottish student invented a solar-powered heated blanket with the goal of helping unhoused people keep warm.
Her now award-winning design is integrated into a backpack and powered by the sun, allowing for easy, on-the-go use.
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The U.S. finalized a new rule to remove medical debt from credit reports, impacting millions of Americans
Originally proposed in the summer of 2024, the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau just finalized a new rule to remove medical debt from consumer credit reports.
The decision will erase an estimated $49 billion in unpaid medical bills from the credit reports of around 15 million people.
The rule goes into effect in March, and while it’s expected to face legal challenges, some major credit companies have already taken voluntary steps to implement it.
Why is this good news? For too long, an unexpected illness or diagnosis has left people with unpaid medical bills that have impacted their credit score and their ability to take out a loan, get a mortgage, and more. An unexpected medical event shouldn’t decide whether or not a person can buy a home, buy a car, start a business, and more.
An 8-year-old invented a “self-regulating bracelet” to help neurodivergent kids communicate in school
When 8-year-old Zoeya Khan was tasked with engineering a project that brings a creative solution to the world, she designed something to help her neurodivergent peers.
Her invention, The Self Regulation Bracelet is designed to improve communication in classrooms for neurodivergent students — including young people who have conditions like autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and more.
Khan’s design looks like a simplified smartwatch, with a round white face that contains a button-activated system. That system then provides visual responses through colored lights, which can enable communication solutions between students, peers, and teachers.
Indonesia just launched a nationwide program to provide free meals to nearly 90 million children and pregnant people
To fight the stunting of growth that impacts 21.5% of children under 5 years old in Indonesia, the country just launched its ambitious Free Nutritious Meal program.
The program will feed nearly 90 million children and pregnant people in the country through 2029. Specifically, the program aims to feed the country’s 83 million schoolchildren across 400,000 schools.
In addition to fighting malnutrition, the program is also intended to help raise the income of the country’s farmers.
What’s the nuance? The program is expected to cost $28 billion total through 2029, and critics worry it’s not affordable. But the new government said it ran the cost calculations and “We are capable.” Plus, the health and wellness of the country’s younger generations is an investment that it expects to pay dividends in the long run.
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A Los Angeles veterinarian is caring for dozens of pets in need of shelter from the wildfires
After taking in her brother’s rabbit and cat as they fled the Palisades fire, Annie Harvilicz immediately thought of all the other pets that would need shelter from the fires.
Harvilicz runs two veterinary hospitals and quickly put out a call on Facebook inviting people to bring their animals to her if they needed.
In addition to calls from people offering to volunteer their help, people took her up on her offer. With around 20 dogs, 20 cats, and one rabbit — she expected to see even more animals come into her care in the coming days, and even brought some to her home.
Why is this good news? Harvilicz said that many of the pet owners contacting her own multiple pets, and while they “might be able to take one dog or cat to a hotel but not two or three.” Harvilicz also was stocked with essential supplies like food and bedding.
More good news of the week —
A team of “avalanche rescue dogs” help save lives and keep skiers safe at a Northern California ski resort. Just like all kinds of rescue dogs, they’re trained to use their agility and sense of smell to find and rescue people trapped in snow — and they can do it faster than any team of humans.
Thanks to conservation efforts, Kazakhstan’s snow leopard population has reached near-historic levels. Snow leopards face threats including poaching, expanding economic activities, climate change, and conflicts with local communities, and to mitigate these risks, efforts are being made to establish new protected areas.
For the first time in the country’s history, Iceland’s government is made up of and led by a majority women. The government has more women than men, all party leaders are women, and both the president and prime minister are women.
Belgium is now the first country in the EU to ban the sale of disposable vapes. The ban is intended to combat both their widespread use by children and their environmental damage and follows a similar ban in Australia and another to come in England later this year.
Kansas City announced a new “wellness court” to help people struggling with mental health disorders and addiction. Previously, as the court system would try to determine charges for crimes involving mental health and addiction, it realized that accurate assessments were difficult until a person is stabilized and maintaining sobriety.
Now in effect, New York employers must provide paid leave for pregnant workers to attend prenatal medical appointments. Valid for physical exams, end-of-pregnancy care, fertility treatments, and more, New York is now the first state to offer this kind of paid leave, which its governor pushed for to reduce infant and maternal mortality rates.
LGBTQ veterans and the U.S. Pentagon reached a historic settlement over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” discharges. The agreement could restore veterans’ benefits to military service members who were discharged, sometimes dishonorably, on the basis of their sexual orientation under the policy, which ended in 2011.
New technology is helping protect and save highly endangered right whales. While there used to be thousands of right whales, only about 370 remain — hunting reduced their numbers to around 100 or less in the 1930s, and human activity is still their main cause of death.
Under a new bill, New York is charging fossil fuel companies for damage from climate change. The new law requires companies responsible for substantial greenhouse gas emissions to pay into a state fund for infrastructure projects meant to repair or avoid future damage from climate change.
New Jersey just joined five other states in expanding protections for libraries amid surging book bans. In the 2023-2024 school year, there were 10,000 instances of book bans across the U.S. — nearly three times as many as the year before.
Helping people get a fresh start, local newspapers in the U.S. are deleting or updating old crime stories. While people who’ve committed minor crimes can get their records cleared or hidden from job applications, there isn’t a similar process in another place where information lives forever: the internet.
Scientists say they’ve discovered the “Achilles heel” of drug-resistant bacteria and can fight infection without drugs or harmful chemicals. New tactics in controlling infection are desperately needed, with antibiotic-resistant bacteria expected to claim as many as 2 million lives each year by 2050.
The U.S. government bought land in Grand Teton National Park to protect it from private development. The sale will return approximately $69.6 million to Wyoming’s Common School Permanent Fund within the first 10 years.
All city buildings in Chicago now rely on 100% renewable energy. The move is projected to cut the carbon footprint of the country’s third-largest city by approximately 290,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year — the equivalent of taking 62,000 cars off the road, according to the city.
Thanks to conservation efforts, Massachusetts beaches have seen a four-decade-record number of Piping Plover nests. Since 1986, a conservation program has helped monitor and protect the state’s vulnerable beach-nesting birds like the Piping Plover, which at one point had fewer than 200 breeding pairs.
