Sure, these are days full of terrifying tweets and monsters from hell (a.k.a the ocean).

But! There’s a light at the end of the Mariana Trench — at least three of them, in fact:

India’s renewable promise: The Indian government predicts it will be three years ahead of schedule for renewable energy targets established in last year’s Paris talks. If all goes according to plan, India would get 57 percent of its electricity capacity from non-fossil fuel sources by 2027, eliminating the need to open new coal plants.

Where the sky’s the limit: Las Vegas has become America’s latest city to run its municipal facilities entirely on renewable energy. Last week’s opening of a new solar array in southeastern Nevada put the final touch on a decade-long conversion. Looks like it’s time for a new slogan — what happens here, stays out of the greenhouse effect? Hmm.

I don’t want no shrubs (because I’m the ozone layer): A new study shows that when reindeer graze on shrubs, they help increase the amount of sunlight reflected back into space and away from the heat-absorbing ground. (That’s good, because we don’t need more heat in the Arctic right now.) Thanks, you wacky ungulates!

Bonus: You’ll end up with dinner conversation fodder that isn’t directly related to the impending inauguration, but also isn’t totally superficial. Dig in:

• In a year of failures (sorry), the Dakota Access pipeline resistance at Standing Rock was a rare success. How? Why? Louise Erdrich explains for The New Yorker.
• How do women’s ambitions change when they “grow up?” More importantly, what role does pervasive sexism play in that change? Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace documented how their sorority sisters’ trajectories changed after college for The Atlantic.
• Standing Rock victory aside, it’s been a very bad year for environmental activists around the world. Kimon de Greef explores the dark world of mining in South Africa via the assassination of an activist who fought to fix it.
• Food keeps us, you know, physically alive — but the right kind of meal can bolster the will to live. The Ringer’s Danny Chau wrote up a detailed account of the 10 best comfort meals of the year.

Andrew Reynolds, an adviser with the Harvard-based Electoral Integrity Project (EIP), has observed elections across the world — from Afghanistan to Burma, Egypt to Sudan.

“If it were a nation state,” Reynolds writes in the Raleigh News & Observer, “North Carolina would rank right in the middle of the global league table – a deeply flawed, partly-free, democracy that is only slightly ahead of the failed democracies that constitute much of the developing world.”

North Carolina scored 58 on EIP’s 100-point scale in its report on the 2016 elections, ranking near Cuba, Indonesia, and Sierra Leone for overall electoral integrity. When it comes to the state’s electoral laws and voter registration, it does even worse, standing alongside Iran and Venezuela. Its score on unfair districting is the worst in the world: a whopping 7 out of 100.

The implications are vast: the GOP-controlled legislature succeeded in a last-minute attempt to limit the incoming Democratic governor’s power. This less-than-stellar democracy has its share of suffering already, ranging from wildfires to floods to toxic coal ash spills and millions lost in state revenue after passing HB2 anti-transgender bathroom bill.

Recently, a federal court ordered the state to redraw it’s notoriously gerrymandered districts earlier this year. Maybe North Carolina will graduate to second-worst government in the world on districting, after that.

Global poverty isn’t exactly a small problem. But we aren’t intimidated to take on the big issues.

If you missed Nathanael Johnson’s Facebook Live conversation today, check it out to gain some insight into his latest in-depth series — The Poverty Solution: Put People First.

Penn State’s Michael Mann will be permitted to proceed with a lawsuit against writers from the conservative National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute after an appeals court ruling in his favor Thursday.

Mann, the scientist behind the “hockey stick” graph, has been a frequent target of climate change deniers’ harassment.

“Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” wrote Rand Simberg in a 2012 Competitive Enterprise Institute blog post, “except for instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in service of politicized science that could have dire consequences for the nation and planet.”

The National Review’s Mark Steyn quoted these comments in a post of his own, writing that Simberg “has a point” and calling Mann’s work “fraudulent.”

Mann accused the two writers of libel, and now a three-judge panel for the D.C. Court of Appeals has ruled that he may proceed with his defamation suit against the authors and their institutions.

“Tarnishing the personal integrity and reputation of a scientist important to one side may be a tactic to gain advantage in a no-holds-barred debate over global warming,” wrote Judge Vanessa Ruiz in the court’s decision. Now it could be a costly one.

The iconic former CBS newsman took to Facebook with a fresh hot take on Wednesday, this one about climate change deniers. Rather thinks they deserve a new name: Reality deniers.

It may seem trivial, but language really is a contentious debate in the fight over public perception. One debate is even about the best term to describe the issue itself — “global warming” versus “climate change.” According to one scholar with Gallup, there isn’t much of a difference in how people respond to the two terms, though GOP pollster Frank Luntz wanted the Bush White House to abandon “global warming” for what he viewed as the less-frightening term.

When it comes to labeling the people who reject the science themselves, emotions run higher. Climate change deniers, for their part, tend to loathe the term “denier,” preferring to call themselves “skeptics,” or, more ludicrously, “optimists.” But here at Grist, we prefer to call ’em like we see it. A denier is a denier.