Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, where your Intrepid GNR newsroom (myself, Killer 300 and Bhu) Bring you good news stories to start your week off right.
First off, happy belated mother’s day, I hope everyone who could had a swell time with their moms.
Second, Its a big week for me personally. Today (Monday) I have an online hearing against my store because they don’t want to keep paying my partial unemployment. I think it will be fine because I have the law on my side, but wish me luck nevertheless. Tuesday I go for a followup checkup at the Orthopedics office to see if I can go back to work (Again, wish me luck) and Thursday I have an interview for a job at Walgreens (Third times the charm, wish me luck again), so my week is full.
But yeah, after a full month sitting around I will be glad to get back to work. Here’s hoping.
So with that preamble out of the way, lets get on with the news.
Bellingham’s industrial Old Town district is finally beginning its transformation into the walkable neighborhood city planners have long envisioned—thanks, in part, to a decision last year to try giving builders full flexibility over parking counts in that area.
The experiment has paid off. The first building proposed since the regulatory change will have more than twice the number of homes as would have been allowed last year.
“The shift to no parking minimums was a clear win in this case,” wrote Ali Taysi, a land use consultant for the project.
Another victory in the fight to make cities livable again.
Why I Am Optimistic About Winning This November - In case you didn’t catch yesterday’s post, we had a very good week of polling with two high-quality, independent polls showing Biden with likely voter leads of 4 and 5 points:
ABC News Biden 49%-Trump 45% (+4)
NPR/Marist Biden 52%-Trump 47% (+5)
For more on my latest thinking about the 2024 election:
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New poll analysis - Biden Leads 49%-45% In New ABC Poll
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New comprehensive video presentation, written analysis - My Latest Take on The 2024 Election
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Trump Is The Ugliest Political Thing We’ve Ever Seen - A detailed look at the historic awfulness of Trump, and the very real world struggles MAGA is having in mounting serious political campaigns across the US.
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Six Things Voters Are Going To Learn About Trump That Will Make It Very Hard For Him To Win - In the coming months voters are going to learn six new things about Trump they didn’t know before, and any of one of these six things will make it very hard for him to win. Overcoming all six I think is not something this deeply diminished and dangerous man will be able to do.
Things are looking good for us both home and abroad, with more good news courtesy of Hopium.
Aluminum is a crucial raw ingredient in the fight against climate change. But to ensure the transition off fossil fuels is a clean one, the industry needs a serious makeover. A new federally funded “green smelter” could help make that happen.
Making this remarkably versatile metal requires a huge — and near-constant — supply of electricity. Much of it is generated by burning fossil fuels, which is one reason aluminum manufacturers are responsible for about 1.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year. That’s more than twice the amount all of Australia spews annually.
Cleaning things up poses a huge challenge, one the Department of Energy, or DOE, wants to help solve. In March, the agency announced $6 billion in funding for “industrial demonstration” projects that showcase promising strategies for reducing the climate impact of heavy industry. The need is particularly acute, because heavy industrial processes like aluminum production generate nearly one-third of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
New green industries are always good news.
California spent the last decade building up a massive fleet of batteries to help clean up its electrical grid. This spring, those storage plants passed a major threshold, and now are visibly reshaping the state’s power grid — just as clean energy advocates said they would.
Governor Gavin Newsom announced in late April that California hit the 10 gigawatt mark for installed battery capacity, well beyond what any other states — or entire countries — have achieved. That’s about 13 times more battery capacity than the state had installed just five years ago, and it’s enough to make batteries a meaningful portion of the state’s power supply. For reference, 10 gigawatts are enough to meet about 20 percent of the peak electricity demand recorded in the grid managed by the California Independent System Operator (CAISO).
With this kind of scale, it’s possible to investigate if batteries are doing the tasks that their fans have long promised: manage the evening decline of solar, enable more solar generation, and reduce the need to burn fossil gas.
Climeworks has officially switched on the world’s largest “direct air capture” plant, which sits on a lava plateau in southern Iceland.
On Wednesday, the Swiss company said it started operations at its Mammoth facility, marking an important milestone in the world’s emerging efforts to remove planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and permanently lock it away.
The plant’s opening also helps lay the groundwork for a significantly larger direct air capture facility that Climeworks plans to build in the United States using federal funding, experts say.
At the Mammoth site, not far from Iceland’s capital city, Reykjavík, a dozen “collector containers” are stacked high in rows that resemble giant window blinds from the front. Fans pull air into the collectors, then run it over a solid filter material to separate out the carbon dioxide. Climeworks’ partner, Carbfix, takes the resulting concentrated CO2 and reacts it with basaltic rock to trap the greenhouse gas below ground.
And in this week’s edition of “Science is awesome”, we have this. Pretty cool stuff.
Many commentators think that the Federal Trade Commission’s rule banning noncompetes is illegal, though they have difficulty agreeing why, or even articulating why. The mostly unarticulated assumption seems to be that the Supreme Court or conservative lower courts will simply not allow the FTC to regulate and will gin up some rationalization in due course. As one commentator put it, “my rationale is that any agency rulemaking that’s a big enough deal to make the front page of the New York Times is likely going to be invalidated by the courts.” We can’t read the minds of the judges. But a reminder of some familiar principles of administrative law does not seem out of place.
The FTC is an administrative agency, and for the time being at least, it is settled law in the United States that Congress can give agencies the authority to make policy by issuing regulations, and that Courts should defer to those policy judgments as long as procedural requirements are satisfied and the judgments themselves are not arbitrary. Thousands of rules, from pollution regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency to corporate disclosure requirements imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, rest on this legal foundation. Not even the current right-leaning Supreme Court majority shows an inclination to abolish our system of administrative regulation, even if it routinely trims it along the edges.
Yeah I may be running into a bit of this tomorrow, where corporations decide something is “Illegal” just because it doesn’t favor them. ITS NOT ALL ABOUT YOU JAN.
Vermont state lawmakers just passed a measure that would require all utilities to provide 100 percent clean energy by 2035.
The bill would put the state on track to be among the first to fully decarbonize, outpaced only by Rhode Island, which requires utilities to provide all-renewable power by 2033. Advocates involved with the Vermont bill’s passage told Canary Media that the new standard would underpin parallel climate efforts, like the state’s bid to electrify its home heating sector.
“The renewable energy standard will be the backbone of a clean electric grid that will enable us to cut costs, cut carbon, and create healthier homes and communities,” said Johanna Miller, energy and climate program director at the Vermont Natural Resources Council.
Way to go Vermont.
The discourse in the United States has gone from being fever pitch about the Israel-Hamas war to fever pitch about the campus protests over it. Lately, the conversation is less about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the US’ foreign policy in regard to Israel, or ceasefire negotiations, and more about why Columbia University decided to cancel its graduation ceremony.
As per usual, the most outrage-inducing stories, which highlight the very worst of both sides, often get the most play in mainstream media and on our social feeds.
A nice collection of good news from our other counterpart, what could go right?
oday’s piece is about how airline lobbyists were soundly thrashed in a fight over whether and how to offer refunds for flights that are canceled. While you would think something so simple would have been fixed long ago, it turns out that airlines have been stiffing people, on the order of potentially tens of billions, for years. Finally, this week, they lost, and Congress, yes, the dysfunctional body everyone hates, passed a law mandating that airlines give automatic refunds when your flight is canceled and you aren’t rebooked.
But it’s how the airlines lost that matters, because their loss implies that it is in fact possible to govern. The dispute represents, in miniature, the broader rethink of regulating corporations in America going on right now. You won’t hear this kind of good news most places, because we’re so inured to imagining politics can’t work. But it can. And it just did.
Its time for corporations to stop caring only about money and start doing the right thing.
In a first-ever human clinical trial, an mRNA cancer vaccine developed at the University of Florida successfully reprogrammed patients’ immune systems to fiercely attack glioblastoma, the most aggressive and lethal brain tumor.
The results in four adult patients mirrored those in 10 pet dog patients suffering from brain tumors whose owners approved of their participation.
The discovery represents a potential new way to recruit the immune system to fight treatment-resistant cancers using an iteration of mRNA technology and lipid nanoparticles, similar to COVID-19 vaccines, but with two key differences: use of a patient’s own tumor cells to create a personalized vaccine, and a newly engineered complex delivery mechanism within the vaccine.
Neat, another victory in the war against cancer.
Members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) have agreed to a new work contract with Daimler Truck. This contract promises a minimum of a 25% raise over four years for the workers.
Almost all the workers, about 94.5%, voted in favor of this new contract. It covers over 7,300 hourly UAW workers. They reached this agreement at the last minute in April, avoiding a strike.
The contract affects workers in six facilities in southern states where there aren’t many unions. These include four factories in North Carolina and some warehouses in Georgia and Tennessee.
This agreement comes right before workers at a Mercedes factory in Alabama vote on joining the UAW.
The contract also includes profit-sharing and adjustments for the cost of living. It’s for workers who make Freightliner and Western Star trucks, Thomas Built buses, and others. It also ends the wage tiers where some workers were paid less.
More great union news.
And that’s all for this week. I hope everyone has a good week, wish me luck on mine!