Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, where the GNR Newsroom (Myself, Bhu and Killer300) bring you good news to get your week off to a good start.
Well once again I am covering another holiday; Columbus day. Probably a holiday most people would be happy to see go away, because Columbus was just the worst. I for one will be “celebrating” the day by watching Italian horror movies, given attention to Italians who actually deserve it.
But enough of that, on with the news.
When over 40 Cambridge students and academics occupied the elite U.K. university’s BP Institute earlier this year, they were escalating one of the newest, fastest-growing campaigns focused on dissociating higher education institutions from fossil fuels. For just over an hour, activists from the grassroots initiative Fossil Free Research held a sit-in inside the building named after one of Europe’s largest oil producers, while making speeches and staging a street theater production that called attention to links between BP and the school.
“We’re drawing attention to how the fossil fuel industry continues to infiltrate prestigious academic institutions, mooch off their credibility, and even exert influence over the production of knowledge crucial to shaping climate policy,” said Ilana Cohen, a lead organizer for the international Fossil Free Research campaign, who is currently a senior at Harvard.
Good. We need to stop the fossil fuel industry from continuing to rewrite the narrative on climate change. Enough is enough.
U.S. workers have waged more strikes in the first nine months of 2022 than in all of 2021, data shows, lending evidence to unions’ and activists’ observations that the labor movement is undergoing a resurgence.
According to Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations’s (ILR) Labor Action Tracker, between January and the end of September, there were 288 strike actions across the U.S. and its territories. In all of 2021, researchers tracked about 260 strikes and work stoppages.
The labor movement is back in a big way, hopefully this momentum will continue.
The world is currently witnessing an uprising in Iran, in the face of great state brutality, for liberation from gender, social and economic oppression. This nationwide revolt, the latest in a series of popular uprisings, was sparked by the brutal killing two weeks ago of a young Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Zhina Amini, in custody of the state’s Guidance Patrol, or “morality police,” for so-called improper hijab (headscarf and coverings legally mandated in Iran for women).
Protesters have called for an end to the dictatorship, that the policing of women’s bodies be stopped, that hijab be optional according to each individual’s personal choice, an end to discrimination against Kurdish people and other ethnic minorities in Iran, and an end to economic injustice. Women and young people are at the forefront of these protests and students at numerous universities have boycotted classes. At least 83 protesters have been killed by security forces. What we are witnessing in Iran is a feminist revolt that has sparked a larger anti-government uprising.
Our hearts once again go out to the brave women of Iran fighting for their freedom against oppression.
abcock Ranch calls itself “America’s first solar-powered town.” Its nearby solar array — made up of 700,000 individual panels — generates more electricity than the 2,000-home neighborhood uses, in a state where most electricity is generated by burning natural gas, a planet-warming fossil fuel.
The streets in this meticulously planned neighborhood were designed to flood so houses don’t. Native landscaping along roads helps control storm water. Power and internet lines are buried to avoid wind damage. This is all in addition to being built to Florida’s robust building codes.
Some residents, like Grande, installed more solar panels on their roofs and added battery systems as an extra layer of protection from power outages. Many drive electric vehicles, taking full advantage of solar energy in the Sunshine State.
Climate resiliency was built into the fabric of the town with stronger storms in mind.
So when Hurricane Ian came barreling toward southwest Florida this week, it was a true test for the community. The storm obliterated the nearby Fort Myers and Naples areas with record-breaking surge and winds over 100 mph. It knocked out power to more than 2.6 million customers in the state, including 90% of Charlotte County.
But the lights stayed on in Babcock Ranch.
This is what the future looks like, with communities built to withstand natural disasters and not just for money.
Efforts to revive coral reefs have existed for decades. Traditionally, restoration has involved growing corals in the ocean, with natural growth rates per year ranging from less than a centimeter to up to 10 centimeters, depending on the species. But as the threat against reefs has intensified, researchers are introducing innovative methods to farm, grow and plant healthy corals more efficiently.
These advances include growing them in tanks on land, or using advanced techniques to boost growth rates and resiliency to the changing environment. Coral Vita’s founders say they are integrating a range of these approaches — such as cutting corals into small pieces, a process known as “microfragmentation” — to grow corals up to 50 times faster than in nature, improve their resilience to climate change and provide large-scale restoration services through land-based farms.
The idea behind a farm model that combines science and production technology is to “reframe the process of coral farming from kind of a coral-gardening style that it traditionally has been and move it more towards a coral-factory-style setup,” says Halpern, 32, the company’s president.
Sounds fascinating. I hope the succeed.
Michigan election officials would begin processing absentee ballots two days before the Nov. 8 election under legislation approved Wednesday in hopes of avoiding delays in counting, with absentee voting expected to remain a popular option.
Michigan is one of several key swing states that allows no-excuse mail-in ballots but doesn’t allow local election offices to begin processing ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day, which often delays results in tight races and can leave a gaping hole for misinformation and lies to flood the public space.
Every day our chances in November look a little bit better.
Nobody really likes being tracked around the web, but rejecting cookies in a pop-up window every time you're presented with the option can be exhausting. Now, there's a tool that will do it for you automatically, and it's called Consent-O-Matic.
Despite it being four years since Europe's GDPR data protection and privacy law was passed, along with the creation of consent management platforms (CMPs) meant to ensure compliance with GDPR, many sites still outright violate regulations and deceptively track internet activity. In April, researchers at Aarhus University released Consent-O-Matic to automatically reject permission requests to track you.
“Cookie pop-ups are designed to be confusing and make you 'agree' to be tracked,” the team’s Chrome extension summary reads. “This add-on automatically answers consent pop-ups for you, so you can't be manipulated. Set your preferences once, and let the technology do the rest!”
A neat little bit of technology.
The coal-fired Loy Yang A power station in Victoria will close in 2035, its owner AGL Energy said.
Australia - one of the world's biggest emitters per capita - has long been considered a climate policy laggard.
AGL is the nation's biggest electricity generator and polluter and has come under pressure to limit fossil fuels.
Loy Yang A emitted 16.6 million tonnes of greenhouse gas in 2019-20, according to most recent data. Australia in total emitted 513.4 million tonnes during the same period.
The closure is "a major step forward in Australia's decarbonisation journey", AGL chief executive Damien Nicks said in a statement to Australia's stock exchange.
Good. The sooner that eyesore closes the better.
NEW DELHI, Sept 29 (Reuters) - India's top court on Thursday upheld the right of a woman to an abortion up to 24 weeks into pregnancy regardless of marital status, a decision widely hailed by women's rights activists.
The right to abortion has proved contentious globally after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned in June its landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that had legalised the procedure across the United States.
"Even an unmarried woman can undergo abortion up to 24 weeks on par with married women," said Justice D.Y. Chandrachud of India's Supreme Court, holding that a woman's marital status could not decide her right to abort.
We. wont. go. back.
Viewed from the level of Iran’s acrid, smoke-filled streets, the protests that have swept the country since the death a week ago of a young woman in the custody of the morality police have unleashed a pent-up determination to create real change in the Islamic Republic.
The protesters’ stated goals go beyond merely reforming the strict rules about women’s dress and extend to broadly expanding freedoms. And they speak openly of using violence to chip away at what they say is the calcified edifice of the regime.
Yet it is women’s outrage that is the driving force.
The people of Iran have had enough, and they wont stop until Masha Amini has been avenged.
This post is a roundup of news about the ongoing shift away from the dirtiest machinery still in legal use, gas-powered leaf blowers. The change is happening, and it is speeding up.
Over the past seven years, the District of Columbia has set a standard for the nation by considering, approving, and now successfully implementing a complete ban on the sale or use of this destructive machinery. My wife, Deb, and I have been part of a D.C. citizens group working on this change. One of our watchwords has been “accelerating the inevitable,” as with previous limits on smoking or dangerous pesticides like DDT.
Sooner or later, we’ll make these changes. So let’s do it sooner.
This week, in a very good story in theWashington Post, Rachel Kurzius, who has covered the D.C. evolution of this issue, writes about it on the national scale. She says: “First, let’s deal with gas-powered leaf blowers, which are viewed about as favorably these days as smoking indoors.”
Every little bit helps right?
WASHINGTON (AP) — Responding to “overwhelming demand,” the Environmental Protection Agency is nearly doubling the money available to states to buy electric models of the familiar yellow school buses that millions of children ride every school day.
The EPA made $500 million available for clean buses in May, but is increasing that to $965 million for districts across the country. An additional $1 billion is expected to be available in the budget year that begins Saturday.
In the current year, the agency said it has received about 2,000 applications requesting nearly $4 billion for more than 12,000 buses, mostly electric.
Neat. The wheels on the bus go round and round.
The maturing solar industry is sniffing out every last possible cost reduction for its increasingly massive power plants. Like a truffle pig sensing treasure, startup Ojjo looked below ground.
Solar panels at large-scale projects usually have to sit on something, and the standard approach is to use pile drivers to hammer steel H-beams into the ground. But straight beams need to be strong enough to resist wind, and that requires overbuilding them relative to the task of holding up solar panels.
Then there’s the issue of widely varying soil types. Stony or hard-packed soils can resist pile drivers, forcing technicians to predrill holes to drive the beams into.
Sometimes the biggest cost reductions for clean energy technologies come not from innovation in labs or factories, but from simple and commonsense improvements in how they’re deployed in the field.
For electric-vehicle charging infrastructure, that field is the parking lot — or, in the case of Shoals Technologies Group, on top of the parking lot. And Shoals’ latest improvement is a system for laying cables and wires aboveground, not below.
Not only are green technologies becoming more popular, they are becoming cheaper as well.
CNN —
President Joe Biden is taking his first major steps toward decriminalizing marijuana, fulfilling a campaign pledge to erase prior federal possession convictions and beginning the process of potentially loosening federal classification of the drug.
Biden on Thursday pardoned all prior federal offenses of simple marijuana possession, a move that senior administration officials said would affect thousands of Americans charged with that crime.
This was covered earlier this week. But it deserves covering again because this was awesome. Way to go Biden.
Activists like Apryl Lewis have the public’s attention. Polls show both a great deal of contemporary concern about housing and a commitment to remedying the problem. A 2021 survey showed that two-thirds of Americans in growing metropolitan areas are “extremely/very concerned” about homelessness and the high cost of housing, ranking it as their top priority. “Housing is the most critical component for a successful community,” Lewis said. “A lot of issues we are struggling with, like crime, are connected to people not being able to stay housed.”
At a more individual level, housing insecurity is associated with all manner of health crises, from asthma and heart disease to violence and suicide. “If you are not secure in your housing, your mental health is in jeopardy. You are always stressing, you are always at level 10 because you are fighting for housing,” Lewis said. “I can tell you myself that me sitting here in a comfortable position in my housing, my thought patterns are way better than when I was struggling to stay housed.”
So it should be no surprise that surveys also show that three-quarters of Americans agree with the tenants chants in Charlotte and around the nation: safe, secure housing should be considered a human right. Those Americans are not content for that right to be an abstraction: The vast majority of people expressing support of housing as a human right also support expanded government programs to make that right a reality.
We need to stop the super rich from buying up all the homes and hoarding them like dragons on piles of gold. Because the common man needs a place to live as well.
en. Chuck Grassley (Iowa), the most senior member of the Senate GOP conference, says he would vote against a national 15-week abortion ban sponsored by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) that has caused a political headache for fellow Republicans.
“I would vote ‘no,’” Grassley said at a televised debate Thursday night with his Democratic election opponent, Mike Franken.
Grassley’s opposition is surprising because he previously co-sponsored Graham’s bill, introduced last year, to ban abortion after 20 weeks.
It seems like some of the GOP haven’t realized that abortion is not the winning strat they hoped. Lets teach them that lesson in November.
The Biden administration has reunited 500 children separated from their parents under the Trump White House’s zero tolerance border policy, an official told The Hill Friday.
The benchmark follows nearly two years of steady work by the Biden administration, which tasked itself with reuniting an estimated more than 1,000 children who remained separated from their parents due to the 2018 Trump policy.
“Five hundred is a really important milestone. Obviously, the first step for these families is that physical reunification and going through that process,” Michelle Brané, executive director of the administration’s Family Reunification Task Force, told The Hill.
despite hurdles thrown in his way by Trump appointed judges and others, Biden and his administration are working hard to help those hurt by Trump.
And on that note its time to say adieu again from the GNR. Have a good week, and don’t fill up too much on Pumpkin Spice.