Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, where your intrepid GNR Newsroom (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu) bring you all the good news meant to get your week started off right. We got a hearty amount of good news this week, so lets get right on to it Shall we?
The rooftop solar industry is booming, but far too few lower-income Americans are benefiting as a result. It’s a “modern version of redlining,” according to Joe Evans of the Kresge Foundation. Now an increasing number of charitable foundations are stepping up to redress that injustice, using a range of approaches to bring the benefits of solar to the communities that need it most.
Thanks to foundations, more than 300 solar panels were installed in the Hopi and Navajo Nations in Arizona, creating jobs and providing reliable electricity to health centers, schools and other community buildings. A former coal mining area in West Virginia became a hub of solar development, with a comprehensive solar job-training program. Dozens of Wisconsin nonprofits received free solar panels, accelerating their shift to clean energy and boosting enthusiasm for solar in their communities. And 24 U.S. health centers in areas at risk for natural disasters developed solar systems with battery backup to supply power when the grid goes down.
Very cool news about how foundations are helping everyone get a piece of the solar energy pie.
The Inflation Reduction Act will create a lot of new construction jobs for people building the electric-vehicle and battery factories and the wind and solar manufacturing and generation projects spurred by the law’s hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and incentives.
Plenty more jobs will be created at those sites once construction is complete. And the IRA will spur “indirect” jobs at companies that supply the new facilities with goods and services, as well as “induced” jobs tied to these workers spending their wages within local economies.
So says a new report from E2 (Environmental Entrepreneurs) that tallies employment expected to be triggered by 210 major clean-energy projects announced in the first 12 months after the law’s passage. The analysis finds that these projects will spur a total of 303,500 jobs each year over a typical five-year construction phase, and a total of another 99,600 jobs each year after that in their long-term operations.
The IRA truly is the gift that keeps on giving. Thank you Biden.
Since the pandemic reshaped the way many of us work, office buildings in cities across the country have stood empty. Meanwhile, the US faces a shortage of affordable housing. So why not use the former to fix the latter? That’s the goal of a series of initiatives just launched by the Biden administration, which will put billions of dollars behind such efforts.
Office buildings tend to be in downtown areas that revolve around transportation hubs. To make the most of that, these new initiatives include measures that will prioritize housing units with easy access to public transit.
Many cities are already offering tax incentives to urge developers to convert vacant offices into housing. The federal effort aims to “really supercharge” those changes, as Deputy HUD Secretary Adrianne Todman put it.
Works for me. I’d live in an empty office building. I mean look at that view.
Why did these standard models—including those of Summers himself—fail to explain the possibility that inflation could fall while the labor market remained strong? To illustrate some of the pitfalls made in inflation modeling last year, I revisit two papers, Domash and Summers (2022) (henceforth DS (2022)) and Ball, Leigh and Mishra (2022) (henceforth BLM (2022)), that forecasted high inflation if unemployment remained low.
These two papers essentially used estimated Phillips curve models to predict the trajectory of inflation conditional on labor market conditions. In doing so, they embed many traditional macroeconomic ideas which we at Employ America have been consistently critical of: most especially the use of vacancy rates to gauge the state of the labor market and the risk that there would be shifts in inflation expectations that necessarily cause or risk a runaway wage-price spiral. They fare poorly in explaining the recent path of inflation, even when the models are given access to information about the actual path of the variables they use to explain inflation.
The divergence between reality and the model forecasts are stark. The DS (2022) forecast of nominal wage acceleration and falling real wages was proven wrong almost immediately, as both nominal wage growth and price inflation began to fall a few months after the paper’s release. The BLM (2022) median CPI inflation forecasts have almost all been higher than actual median inflation in the months after the paper was presented, with especially large forecast errors over the past few months. These models demonstrate the pitfalls of using Phillips curve frameworks in trying to explain and predict inflation, and are unsuitable for guiding monetary policy.
Yeah apparently no one predicted Biden would actually do a good job on the economy. Almost like they were rooting for him to fail.
n an important victory for abortion access in the Midwest, a Kansas judge ruled against a handful of stringent anti-abortion measures—some of which trace back decades under the insidiously named Women’s Right to Know Act while others were passed after the fall of Roe v. Wade.
“The Act appears to be a thinly veiled effort to stigmatize the procedure and instill fear in patients that are contemplating an abortion, such that they make an alternative choice, based upon disproven and unsupportable claims,” Johnson County District Court Judge Krishnan Christopher Jayaram wrote on Monday. As requested in the lawsuit filed by abortion providers in the state, Jayaram issued a temporary injunction on these restrictions until a trial set for 2024.
The measures in question required that—on top of a 24-hour waiting period that’s particularly onerous for the state’s many out-of-state abortion seekers from nearby states that have banned abortion—patients receive a range of inaccurate state-mandated information in order to have an abortion. This includes the medically unfounded statements that abortion creates a “risk of premature birth in future pregnancies” and a “risk of breast cancer.” Doctors would also be required to present abortion-seeking patients no fewer than five times with the medically unfounded claim that a medication abortion that’s underway can be “reversed” through a possibly dangerous chemical regimen.
For crying out loud Anti Abortion people really are the fucking worst aren’t they. If they put this much effort into actually helping support children then maybe this wouldn’t even be an issue.
Happy Thursday everyone. 5 days to go! Here’s what’s top of mind for me today:
5 Days Left! Keep Working It Everyone - Know folks in the Hopium community are working hard on races across the US - thank you! If you haven’t signed up for a shift of calls or canvassing this weekend, or have a bit of money to donate, hope you will help us win Virginia. The polling is good there, new financial reports show our candidates are raising a lot of money and will be competitive down the home stretch, but the early vote is still not where we want it to be and we need to close strong. It’s been a very good year for Democrats in elections across the country, and it’s important we head into 2024 with the momentum we need to get to 55 next year.
Despite some doom polling from the NYT, I have a lot of confidence going into 2024, but lets not blow it. We gotta dig deep and work hard, so lets get this done.
Progress, however, is inching forward in a variety of places. In Greece, the center-right government has put same-sex marriage on the table for discussion, although there hasn’t been concrete action yet. And today I’d like to highlight some other notable goings-on for LGBTQ rights, many of which are in Asia.
Same-sex couples in Taiwan can now adopt children. In May, Taiwan updated a law that limited adoption of children by same-sex couples to those biologically related to one partner. Now same-sex couples can adopt under the same rules as heterosexual couples. Same-sex marriage was legalized in 2019.
The Czech Republic may legalize same-sex marriage soon. A bill, supported by both parties, was introduced in May, passed a first round of approval in June, and is now being considered by governmental committees before it will be sent to the Czech Senate.
Nepal’s Supreme court ordered the government to register same-sex marriages. The court’s June order is temporary but still active, while the country awaits legislation from the government to legalize same-sex marriage for good.
Same-sex marriage will become legal in Estonia on January 1, 2024. The legislation was approved in June and will become active in the new year, making Estonia the first Baltic country and the 35th globally with marriage equality. Neighboring Latvia recognizes same-sex civil unions but not marriage; Lithuania recognizes neither.
Hong Kong’s top court gave the government two years to form a framework for the protection of social rights. While the court, in September, did not find that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marriage, it did order the creation of an alternative legal framework to meet “basic social requirements” for them.
Thailand is (re)considering same-sex marriage. The coalition government’s cabinet is reviewing a bill, which includes provisions for adopting children and inheriting properties, this week. If approved, it will be sent to Thailand’s parliament in December, where it will go through three “readings.” If the bill passes, Thailand will become the first Southeast Asian nation to legalize same-sex marriage. A similar bill passed a first parliamentary reading in early summer, but was set aside during election season. The new one is stronger than the first in that it legalizes same-sex marriage, not just civil partnerships.
Things are far from perfect on this front, but every day we make small incremental steps towards a brighter future.
An old coal mine has been providing an English town with green energy for the last six months.
The ground-breaking project in Gateshead is using the warm water that has filled the tunnels to heat hundreds of homes and businesses in the former coalfield community.
Hailed a success, the UK’s first large-scale network shows the huge potential to be found in the nation’s sprawling warren of old mining tunnels, which sit beneath roughly a quarter of homes.
“What we have in Gateshead is a legacy from the days of the coal mines, which was dirty energy,” says John McElroy, cabinet member for the environment and transport at Gateshead Council. “Now we are leading the way in generating clean, green energy from those mines.”
Everything old is new again.
The pilot is being run in Kashiwa-no-ha Smart City by the Universities of Tokyo and Chiba, along with nine companies, including tire maker Bridgestone and auto parts makers NSK and Denso. (Kashiwa Smart City is named that because it’s a model city for intelligent transport system experiments.)
The University of Tokyo created the in-motion power supply system, and now the researchers want to test its durability and ability to consistently charge for EVs and plug-in hybrids driving over it.
Precast charging coils are embedded into the road’s surface in front of traffic lights. A current only passes through the wireless chargers when a vehicle is detected. EVs and PHEVs that have special devices installed near the tires to receive the electricity get a charge when they slow down – 10 seconds of rolling over the coils provides about 1 km (0.6 miles) of range.
What else can I say? I love living in the future.
The blaze, California’s largest ever single fire, burned almost 70% of Lassen. A third of the burn area saw the sort of high-severity fire that kills most trees and bakes the nutrients from topsoil.
However, there is evidence of resilience among the devastation – sprouts emerging from the scorched soil and the black and green mosaic of the mountains. The recovering ecosystem in this off-the-beaten path national park serves as a reminder of the threats to the US’s wild places and offers lessons about how to protect public lands in an era of climate crisis.
Nature is more resilient than you think it is. There is still hope.
And now for your consideration, a GNR Lightning round!
Deaf children in China can hear again after gene therapy
What’s behind the decline in Dementia?
Malaria vaccine slashes early childhood mortality
Glia project 3D prints tourniquets and stethoscopes in Gaza
Green solar energy beamed from space could soon be cheap and plentiful
Ministers to scrap IVF laws denying access to people with HIV
Czech government phasing out oil and coal
Biden administration puts 12 million towards school integration
Incarceration rates for black men and women have been declining since 2000’s
Have workers gotten a raise?
Alright, good lightning round, now back to the stories.
Scientists may have discovered a new diagnostic tool for recognizing the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, providing hope for early detection in the future.
Alzheimer's affects roughly 5.8 million Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The progressive disease is the most common form of dementia and is associated with memory loss and cognitive decline in regions of the brain involved in thought, memory and language.
Scientists believe that Alzheimer's is caused by the abnormal buildup of proteins in and around the brain cells, but exactly what triggers this is still unclear.
Today, there is no known cure for Alzheimer's. However, new medications may offer relief to patients and slow down the development of symptoms, particularly if it is diagnosed early.
I have a friend who has Alzheimer/Dementia, so news like this is very near and dear to me.
Aja Pryor’s struggle with an eating disorder began when he was 12, after being bullied for his weight. But it took until the age of 27, in 2019, for him to access the right treatment.
Being Black and plus-sized, New Jersey-based Pryor didn’t feel he could identify with people who would or should have an eating disorder — nor did his parents see it as something that warranted seeking help.
“I didn’t have a lot of education about eating disorders in middle school. ‘Anorexia is for skinny white girls’ is basically what the textbooks could have said. I didn’t fit the mold. So I never thought I needed to pursue anything,” says Pryor, now 31.
“I grew up Christian, and a lot of what I was taught was, ‘if you’re struggling with this, just pray about it, give it to God and you’ll be fine.’ And if you weren’t fine, it was because you didn’t pray hard enough. These beliefs conflict with getting help for the things that are going on with you.
There’s a lot working against [Black people] when it comes to getting treatment for anything, especially an eating disorder.”
Pryor found help thanks to an approach that’s becoming more common: More eating disorder recovery centers are recognizing the importance of offering tailored, culturally sensitive support for patients of color. The Renfrew Center and Within Health, for example, now offer dedicated BIPOC support groups led by staff from those communities. This approach involves working not just with individuals but with families to break down some of the stigma and barriers people of color experience, and educating the wider medical profession, from doctors to health insurance companies.
Its important to help people get treatment for the things that are ailing them, whoever they may be or whatever is ailing them.
On Thursday, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that state Attorney General Todd Rokita violated rules of professional conduct through public comments he made last year about Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the Indiana doctor who provided abortion care to a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio last July. As a result of the ruling, Rokita will receive a public reprimand and a $250 fine. The court specifically cited Rokita’s July 2022 comments on Fox News, in which he described Bernard as an “abortion activist acting as a doctor—with a history of failing to report,” falsely claiming Bernard hadn’t reported the Ohio rape victim’s abortion to the state.
According to the state Supreme Court’s opinion, Rokita specifically violated rules that prohibit a lawyer from making public statements about an ongoing investigation if the comments could “materially [prejudice]” the investigation; Rokita also violated a rule prohibiting comments that “have no substantial purpose other than to embarrass, delay or burden a third person.” The Indiana AG has since issued a statement maintaining that his comments on Fox News “are factual” and claiming that he’s chosen not to fight the ruling to “save a lot of taxpayer money and distraction.” He then comically insisted he’s somehow a victim of “the cancel culture establishment” after months of trying to cancel Bernard, and, apparently addressing his supporters, declared that “liberal activists” are trying “to cancel your vote because they hate the fact I stand up for liberty.”
Hey remember how I said Anti Abortion people are creepy and awful a bit up there? Yeah that still stands. Seriously fuck this guy.
Electricity is taking over the transportation sector, with batteries replacing fossil-fuel engines in a growing number of passenger cars, big-rig trucks, school buses, delivery vans, speedboats and ferries. Yet one category in particular is only just starting to get on board with battery power: freight trains.
In the United States, tens of thousands of locomotives rumble down railroads every year, pulling cars that collectively carry around 20 billion tons of cargo. All of these powerful engines run on diesel fuel — and, as a result, generate both planet-warming emissions and harmful air pollution that afflicts communities surrounding rail yards and railways.
This week, Wabtec Corp., a rail technology company, took what it says is a “major step” toward electrifying this heavy-duty industry.
And I even like the color.
Dan Zauderer and his in-laws had eaten plenty of pizza one evening in early October, and they still had seven slices left. What to do? “Well, we could just chuck it,” Zauderer thought. Instead, he and his fiancée wrapped the slices in plastic wrap, slapped labels on them with the date, and walked the leftovers a little more than a block down the road to a refrigerator standing along 92nd Avenue in New York City’s Upper East Side.
That fridge is one among many “community fridges” across the country that volunteers stock with free food — prepared meals, leftovers, and you name it. Zauderer had helped set a network up in New York City during the pandemic as a way to reduce waste and fight hunger. The idea came about when he was a middle school teacher looking to provide short-term help to students whose families couldn’t afford food. He stationed the first fridge in the Bronx in September 2020. That one, the Mott Haven Fridge, was hugely popular, and it motivated Zauderer to expand. Since then, he has helped plug in seven more fridges in the Bronx and Manhattan, including the one where he dropped off his leftover pizza.
Now that is an awesome idea. More of that please.
Friends,
So after a weeks of a slugging start to the Virginia early vote, it has really picked up in recent days - very encouraging stuff, and a testament to all those who’ve been working so hard to help us win Virginia. A huge Hopium thank you to all of you!
As encouraging as the vote has been in recent days we are still not where we want to be and need to close strong. So I am asking everyone here to take one action for Virginia today. You can find links for donating and volunteering here, and do watch my talk with Ben Meiselas of MeidasTouch below where I explain why Virginia matters so much. These races are going to be decided by hundreds of votes so every call, text, knocked door and donation really matters. We can do this people!
And to all of you working on the other important elections on Tuesday - good luck and thank you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When we vote early, we win. So lets keep that energy up.
Justin Wolfers: ‘A steady-as-she-goes strong jobs report. Payrolls rose +150k, and while unemployment ticked up a little (to 3.9%), it remains below 4%. Revisions subtracted -101k from job growth over the prior two months. And so over the past 3 months, payrolls have averaged +204k, which is still extraordinary for this stage of the cycle.
Steady as she goes on the economy, things are doing well on that front as well.
Los Angeles is often held up as the case study for car-centric development run amok, with sprawling detached-dwelling neighborhoods bisected by traffic-strewn freeways. But in recent years, the city has been pursuing a completely different path: public transit champion.
The local transit agency, Metro, and the city of Los Angeles have committed to add 100 miles of priority bus lanes before the area hosts the 2028 Summer Olympics. The campaign has hit high gear in 2023, with 30 miles of existing lanes converted to only allow bus traffic during peak travel times.
I certainly hope so, Buses kick ass.
Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here.
Hi, I’m Lee Hepner, an antitrust lawyer filling in for Matt Stoller. At the end of last week, I was inspired to do some digging into labor and industrial policy, spurred by the news that United Auto Workers (UAW) had reached tentative deals with Ford, then Stellantis, and finally General Motors. If the deals are ratified by members, they will cap over three months of strikes and seal some momentous wins.
Those strikes weren’t just about better wages and working conditions for auto workers, which are important on their own. What caught my eye is that the labor unions were able to affect corporate decision-making on a more structural level, as I’ll discuss below. Indeed, Shawn Fain, the head of the UAW, is now the single most important business leader in America, a generational figure who is, ironically, like the reverse image of transformational anti-union General Electric icon Jack Welch.
So today’s issue is about the significance of that shift, and how labor unions and antitrust are being used to wrest control over critical corporate investment decisions from financiers, to empower workers, and to teach Americans how to build again.
Unions are back and they are stronger than ever, that’s good news if I know it.
Friends,
Yes, some not great polls from the New York Times today. There will be time to go through the data and point out the obvious problems (youth, Hispanic, black results just too Republican throughout, results not duplicated in other recent polls, high margin of error, how can you be up 2 in WI and down 5 in MI?) but these polls, like other recent polls, show that we are not where we want to be in the 2024 election, and have a lot of work ahead of us.
So some thoughts on where we are now a year out, with a few reminders:
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Polls cannot tell you anything about where things will be next year, they can only tell you where things stand today
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Polls did not do a very good job of predicting what happened in the 2022 red wave that never came election
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It is not surprising our coalition is wandering a bit right now. We have no election happening, unlike Rs, and the Biden campaign hasn’t really turned on yet. Until it is clear that it is Trump vs Biden - perhaps as early as January - we should expect the 2020 Biden coalition to be soft. My guess
We Have Really Important Elections on Tuesday, And Need To Stay Focused - 2023 has been a very good year for Democrats, and we need to close strong. Whatever you are doing to help us win Tuesday, perhaps do a bit more. We do not have the luxury right now of wallowing in worry - we need to go to work. So make your calls, do your canvassing, donate a bit more and if you are looking for something to do please help the Hopium campaign to help us win Virginia.
Yeah, the NYT polls concerned me too, but the best remedy for that? Stop listening to the New York Times.
n August, Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones won back his seat in the legislature after getting expelled by the Republican majority for protesting gun violence. His margin of victory was an overwhelming 56 percentage points, in a district Joe Biden had won by 41 points in 2020 and Hillary Clinton had carried by 36 points in 2016.
This is the sort of overperformance that’s easily dismissed as a one-off, with such unusual and dramatic circumstances that it couldn’t possibly hold any broader meaning for the country at large. And that’s true—indeed, no single special election should be dissected in order to divine the will of the electorate.
As we keep saying, we are doing amazing this year. Lets keep it up.
We end this weeks GNR on another episode of GNR theater. And this time its special because its not a single feature, its not a double feature, we got a triple feature for you! So sit back, pop the popcorn, and I will see you all next week.