• Next Democratic debate runs into snag because of strike at California venue:
All seven of the Democratic presidential candidates who qualified for next week’s debate at Loyola Marymount University in California have said they refuse to cross the picket line resulting from a culinary worker strike at the university. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang [...] shared on Twitter that they will not attend next week’s Democratic debate. Candidates Sen. Cory Booker and Julián Castro have also expressed support for the union, although neither qualified for this debate.
• Icelanders say process that turns CO2 into rock might be solution to climate crisis. If it can be scaled up, that is. At the Hellisheiði geothermal plant that taps the nation’s prodigious the Earth’s heat just an hour’s drive from the capital of Reykjavík, a research team is running a project that traps carbon dioxide from the power plant and infuses it into the basalt rock in the area. Instead of leaking into the atmosphere, the CO2 becomes part of the landscape. It’s called the Carbfix project. The small injection well now being used they call the “Arctic Fox.” Environmentalist Andri Magnason says: "This captures 50 tons [of C02] a year. To get 1,000 gigatons out of the atmosphere, we have to scale this up not 1 million times, but 1 billion times.” They’re going part of the way by scaling with larger injection wells capable of capturing 1,000 times more emissions than their prototype. Project manager Kári Helgason says a system scaled up to that capacity would mean “we have solved the climate crisis.” Maybe so if everywhere were like Iceland. But Carbfix requires lots of water and the right rocks as well as CO2. Magnason waves off the demurrers: "But if you have a coal-fired power plant and it can fill a tank ship, then the hard work is over. Then you can pump it into basalt anywhere in the world where you have that. So the infrastructure that the 21st century will make, and it has to be as big as sewage or road systems, has to be C02 removal."
• Bloomberg Media buys The Atlantic’s spin-off company CityLab: Half its 16 editorial employees won’t have jobs under the new management, according to Mother Jones.
MIDDAY TWEET
• How to keep Trump’s future extortion attempts against world leaders out of the news? Limit who can listen to his phone calls. Senior officials have reduced the list of Trump regime administrators allowed to hear what the man says in these conversations. “Nobody is allowed on the calls,” a White House official told CNN. “The barn door officially closed after the horse escaped.” Perhaps Ivanka will keep tabs on dad when he’s not handing out quids for quos.
• California governor gives thumbs down to PG&E’s $13.5 billion settlement over wildfires: In a five-page letter Friday, Gov. Gavin Newsom said no way to Pacific Gas and Electric’s proposed $13.5 billion settlement with 70,000 wildfire victims, including the families of 85 people killed in the Camp Fire last year. This puts the giant power company in a bind as it tries to rise out of bankruptcy by June 30 so it can access the $20 billion state-sponsored insurance pool funded mostly by utility shareholders to cover future wildfires. Newsom noted that the settlement would not have meant a guarantee the company would provide safe and reliable power to its customers. “PG&E’s board of directors and management have a responsibility to immediately develop a feasible plan,” he said. “Anything else is irresponsible, a breach of fiduciary duties, and a clear violation of the public trust.” The rejected settlement included $5.4 billion in cash now, another $650 million to be released in January 2021, and $700 million in January 2022. The rest— $6.75 billion in stock in the reorganized PG&E corporation—would have come with a guarantee that a trust fund for fire victims will own no less than 20.9% of the restructured company, but with current shareholders maintaining their control of a company Newsom and a multitude of other critics have said has been mismanaged for a long time. Local officials led by San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo have been put together customer-owned buyout of PG&E.
• New Jersey’s tough laws don’t keep firearms from coming from states where the laws are less strict. Critics say federal legislation is needed, but the Senate majority leader, Mitch the Fixer McConnell, has bottled up in the Senate the most widely popular gun law reform—universal background checks for all purchases or other transfers of guns. The House of Representatives passed HR 8, a UBC bill, in February with a vote of 240-190. Two Democrats voted against it, and eight Republicans voted for it, making it technically bipartisan. Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, told the Associated Press that her group would continue to push laws state by state because of the blockade against any gun law reform at the federal level. “That’s what we have to do now because of the political makeup. Every state is only as safe as the closest state with the weakest gun laws,” she said.