Legal weed
Welcome to What Could Go Right?, a free weekly newsletter from?The Progress Network?written by our executive director, Emma Varvaloucas. In addition to this newsletter, which collects substantive progress news from around the world, The Progress Network publishes an?anti-apocalypse conversational podcast also called What Could Go Right?.
This week we cover Malta becoming the first European Union (EU) country to legalize marijuana, incoming protections for gig workers, and much more. We also learned that mussels?aren’t the only ones who are unfazed by humanity’s plastic problem.
Excited to take your next trip to Malta? Let us know in the comments.
The Middle East: working less and working more
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is ringing in the new year with a change to its government employees’ schedules: they will start their weekend on Friday afternoon, according to?a new 4.5-day work week?that takes effect January 2022. The working hours for Monday through Thursday will remain at the usual eight, but on Fridays, the work day will last only 4.5 hours, with the additional option to work those hours from home. The private sector and schools will likely adopt the same schedule in the future. The UAE is the first nation to make a shorter work week government-official. How about a New Year’s resolution that they won’t be the last?
We can't help but sympathize with this dude's response. (We're feeling a little jealous, too.) Let's go, UAE private sector!
In Saudi Arabia, restrictions on women’s lives, on everything from clothing to employment,?are slowly easing. Women may still need to consult a male guardian in order to get married, but they can now freely socialize with male friends at coffee shops, and they are enthusiastically entering the workforce. “Over the last five years,”?The New York Times?reports, “the percentage of women working outside the home has almost doubled . . . to 32 percent.”
The?Times’ article states multiple times that Saudi women's progress is “uneven,” or occurring in “fits and starts,” and surely it is. But it also seems unrealistic to expect a deeply conservative country to turn on a dime. This is significant change already, and there is more to come, at least if 13-year-old Nout al-Qahtani has anything to do with it. “‘I want to work,” she told the?Times. “‘I really want to be a doctor.’”
Europe and Canada: paradise for smokers and gig workers
Malta has become the first EU country to legalize marijuana, beating Luxembourg, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, all of which have legalization processes in various stages of planning and approval.
Medical marijuana has been legal in Malta since 2018, but soon, as long as you are at least 18 years old, you will be able to hold up to seven grams on your person, grow up to four plants at home, and join a nonprofit cannabis social club where members can share—you guessed it—cannabis and its products for recreational purposes.?Times of Malta?also reported that the law will “expunge the criminal records?of people who were found guilty of possession of cannabis for their personal use.” If you’re a weed entrepreneur, though, it’s still better to set up shop in Colorado: it will not be legal to sell the stuff outside of the social clubs.
We have our eye on an EU proposal that would?grant gig workers the rights of employees. Though this proposal's?passing is likely years away, the tide seems to be finally turning as far as governments taking action to protect vulnerable gig workers. On the other side of the pond, Ontario, Canada is considering creating a new class of employee called a “dependent contractor” that would be entitled to minimum wage and severance. The province may also create a “portable benefits program” that gig workers could join that would give them “continuous health and dental coverage even as they jump from job to job with platform-based employers,” reports CTV News.
United States: Nebraska to fully decarbonize its electricity by 2050
In Nebraska, where electricity is publicly owned and citizens vote for the people who sit on the boards of the utility companies, all three electricity providers have now pledged to decarbonize by 2040 or 2050, making?Nebraska the first and only red state with a plan to fully decarbonize its electricity sector. Several other states already have?similar plans, though, such as Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Nevada, and New Mexico. (Rhode Island gets an overachiever prize for?committing to reach 100% renewable electricity by 2030, the earliest year pledged.) Nebraska has prepped for this moment by spending the last decade building wind farms. It took just nine years, from 2010 to 2019, for Nebraska to go from 1% wind power in its power mix to 20%.
World: democracy takes hold
For a macro-view of how the world has progressed, check out Our World In Data’s latest data set on?how quickly democratic rights have spread?since the late 18th century. “By the late 1990s,” researcher Bastian Herre writes, “the majority of the world’s population—around 3 billion people—lived in electoral and liberal democracies.”
Before we go
The New York Times?put together?a list of the year’s firsts. They’re not all good, but they’re certainly interesting, and many are what may prove to be significant steps forward. There are several space-related achievements, for instance, and here at The Progress Network (TPN) we had missed the world’s largest jewelry brand, Pandora, announcing that it would stop selling?mined diamonds, instead creating its jewelry with?lab-manufactured ones. Neat. We can’t tell the difference between the synthetic and the natural diamonds, although the former?still cost a pretty penny. (This is as close as we get to a TPN holiday gift-giving guide, by the way.)
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And, TPN Member James Fallows has an excellent piece with suggestions for?how to shore up democracy in the US. It may give you some ideas of where to best put your energy.
Below in the links section,?multiple vaccines for a respiratory virus (not that one) enter late-stage trials, activists score victories against climate change in court, and more.
—Emma Varvaloucas
New from the Progress Network
The Next Wave of Higher Education (Bonus Podcast Episode)
Is higher education due for a makeover? TPN Members Sylvia Burwell, president of American University, Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, and Scott Galloway, the founder of Section4, a content platform for accessible business education, speak about what disruptions are desperately needed in higher ed.?Listen to the bonus episode here. The conversation was originally recorded in April.
Other good stuff in the news
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Until next Thursday, gift yourself some moments to marvel at all the history made in the past 12 months.???