You know the drill by now, its Monday, we’re the GNR Newsroom (Killer300, Bhu, and myself) and its time for some good news for you to start your week off right with. So lets get right to it wont we?
The tall grass prairie of the Flint Hills provides food for cattle, and on the Ferrell Ranch, wind to power 50 turbines. The 7,000-acre ranch in Beaumont, Kansas was started by Pete Ferrell’s great-grandfather in 1888. But ranching is hard work, and success is dependent on the weather, so in the 1920s, Ferrell’s grandfather sold leases to extract and sell oil from the land. Those wells helped the ranch survive years when drought dried up income from the ranching operations.
But now Pete Ferrell is extracting another form of energy: wind. Since 2005, wind turbines have been producing renewable power for the grid and a reliable cash crop for the ranch.
Yale Climate Connections spoke with Ferrell about his ranch and his journey with wind energy.
One major complaint I have heard about wind and solar power is that land could be used for farming. My response is A) okay then why hasn’t it been used already? and B) Looking at this article you can clearly do both.
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court has allowed the Biden administration to remove razor wire barriers that Texas erected along a 29-mile stretch of the Rio Grande meant to block migrants at the Southwest border.
The 5-4 ruling Monday was a temporary victory for the Biden administration and gave the federal government the upper hand in its fight with Texas while the underlying lawsuit continues.
"Texas’ political stunts, like placing razor wire near the border, simply make it harder and more dangerous for frontline personnel to do their jobs," White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said in a statement Monday.
Good, once again the Biden Administration saying no to pointless GOP cruelty.
But Mendenhall is shrinking quickly: The 13-mile-long glacier has retreated about a mile in the past 40 years. Getting all those tourists to Juneau — some 1.5 million this summer by cruise ship alone — requires burning the very thing contributing to its retreat: fossil fuels.
In an effort to mitigate a portion of that CO2, some of those going whale watching or visiting the glacier are asked to pay a few dollars to counter their emissions. The money goes to the Alaska Carbon Reduction Fund, but instead of buying credits from some distant (and questionable) offset project, the nonprofit spends that cash installing heat pumps, targeting residents like Roberts who rely upon oil heating systems.
Its nice to see everyone pitching in and helping to make the world a little more green.
In early December, Clarkston, Georgia became one of 385 U.S. communities to win a Safe Streets and Roads for All grant, earning $1 million to develop a comprehensive street safety plan. That's an unusually large victory for a city of just 14,500 people with median incomes one-third lower than the national average.
And it could prove an unusually impactful one, considering that Clarkston has an annual traffic-fatality rate roughly double the national average — not to mention an unusually large refugee population, many of whom arrive to the United States without cars, jobs that pay well enough to buy them, or even the language skills necessary to read American street signs.
Safer streets for our kids is always good news.
By Daniel Jaffee. January 4, 2024. In 2008, Nestlé Waters announced a proposal to build a large bottling plant in Cascade Locks, Oregon, a town of 1,100 people in the Columbia River Gorge. The plan would have given Nestlé a fifty-year guarantee of access to 118 million gallons of water annually from state-owned Oxbow Spring, which it would transform into hundreds of millions of bottles of Arrowhead brand water to be sold across the Northwest.
Cascade Locks city officials, two Oregon governors, and the state fish and wildlife agency all lined up behind the proposal, continuing to back it throughout the long approval process.
Yet nearly a decade later, in October 2017, the plan was officially dead.
How was a group of residents and activists able to hold off the world’s largest food and beverage corporation for so long, and eventually scuttle its water bottling plans entirely?
This winding story involves an array of regional and national organizations, a prolonged campaign directed at state government, and the emergence of a homespun local movement that assembled a diverse coalition including Indigenous activists and tribal governments, culminating in a precedent-setting countywide public vote on water bottling that contributed to the proposal’s eventual demise.
However, the broader tale both predates and follows Cascade Locks, incorporating several more Northwest communities where Nestlé and other global bottled water firms have attempted to gain a toehold and access spring water.
Its always a good day when Nestle gets told to get stuffed. Because, if you didn’t already know, Nestle is just the absolute fucking worst.
A new report from Politico suggests that former President Donald Trump may have a difficult time winning the White House because, despite how he fares in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, there is a "whole swath" of Republicans who are committed to voting against him.
The outlet cited a recent NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll of Iowa voters, conducted ahead of the Iowa caucuses, in which 43 percent of Nikki Haley supporters indicated that they would vote for President Joe Biden over Trump.
"2024 is different," Politico's report claimed, largely because Trump is being evaluated by voters, not for the strength of his current campaign, but rather, for his prior time spent in the White House. "And that, political veterans warn, makes it much harder for him to win back the people he’s alienated, including those once willing to vote Republican," Politico added.
“I don’t think I can vote for Trump,” one New Hampshire voter and former MAGA supporter said. “I vote in every election, I’ve never left a box blank. And I might have to this time.”
We like to think of the GOP Voter base as this monolithic, fanatical group who would vote for Trump no matter what, but I think its clear that is just not the case, enthusiasm for Trump is at an all time low. We can beat him again.
Energy efficiency is often called the “lowest-hanging fruit” of decarbonization — it’s a lot cheaper to use less energy than to make more clean energy. But making buildings more energy-efficient does cost money — and most building owners don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on improvements that can take years to pay off.
There are ways around that problem: Efficiency providers have developed energy-savings contracts, energy-as-a-service agreements and other financing structures that allow them to take on upfront costs and have customers pay them back over time as a share of energy savings. But those deals can get bogged down in contractual complexities about who’s in charge of making sure the improvements actually deliver the savings they’re intended to and how to split up the proceeds of those savings.
Connecticut-based Budderfly has devised a novel way to cut through the morass — the company simply takes on the responsibility of paying its customers’ utility bills. If the upgrades it pays for, installs and manages for its customers don’t actually reduce energy use, “we don’t get any money,” said CEO Al Subbloie.
Nice to see corporations doing the right thing for a change, This is actually a really cool thing to do.
The first step to removing fossil fuels from steelmaking is to build facilities that can produce the all-important alloy with little to no carbon emissions. And the first step to building those new facilities is to lock down billions and billions of dollars in project financing.
H2 Green Steel, the Swedish company developing what would be the world’s first large-scale green steel plant, has done exactly that.
The firm announced Monday that it has achieved a “massive milestone,” finalizing a 4.75-billion- euro ($5.17 billion) investment. The financing, which is mostly debt, comes just months after the firm announced a €1.5 billion ($1.6 billion) equity round.
Good for them. We need to make all our industries green and as fast as possible.
Bumblebees buzz from flower to flower, stopping for a moment under a clear blue Minnesota sky. Birds chirp, and tall grasses blow in the breeze. This isn't a scene from a pristine nature preserve or national park. It is nestled between photovoltaic (PV) solar arrays on rehabilitated farmland.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory wanted to understand the ecological value of PV solar energy sites planted with native grasses and wildflowers. They examined how vegetation would establish and how insect communities would respond to the newly established habitat. The five-year field study published in Environmental Research Letters looked at two solar sites in southern Minnesota operated by Enel Green Power North America. Both sites were built on retired agricultural land.
A major source of existential dread for me whenever it comes up is the ecological collapse that is happening due to insects dying off. So this bit of good news gave me a lot of hope, because it shows A) This is a problem we can fix, and B) that we can fix it while solving other problems as well. Two birds, one stone.
The Biden administration is expected to postpone its decision on whether to approve a major proposed liquefied-natural-gas export facility until it can more thoroughly study the project’s impacts on the climate and the American public, The New York Times reported Wednesday. If built, the Calcasieu Pass 2 project in Louisiana, better known as CP2, would be the biggest LNG export terminal in the United States.
The delay marks a significant break from precedent for the Biden Department of Energy, which until now had followed in the footsteps of the Trump and Obama administrations in approving every complete LNG export application it considered. President Biden said almost two years ago that he believed the buildout of LNG export capacity could be “consistent with, not in conflict with, the net-zero climate goal that we’re shooting for.”
But over the last few months, pressure has been mounting on Biden to rethink his stance.
And Biden does it again. The planet thanks you Biden.
"There is a war against cars in America," a popular right-wing YouTube channel declared in 2017. The short film argued that tighter emissions standards made gas-powered cars more costly, and were part of a wider push to get people out of their individual vehicles and onto public transportation. "So much for the freedom of the open road," the video lamented.
The views raised in the video were not new, or limited to the US. Accusations of a "war" had been circulating in the UK 15 years previously, as London prepared to introduce what was then the world's largest congestion charge scheme, requiring drivers to pay for city-centre journeys. More recently, the city's expansion of its Ultra-Low Emission Zone (or Ulez), which also charges cars that don't meet certain emissions standards, has seen "Blade Runner" protesters tear down enforcement cameras. In the Belgian city Ghent, the deputy mayor received death threats in the wake of a 2017 plan to discourage short journeys by car.
Despite the ongoing pushback, cities around the world are continuing efforts to reduce traffic and improve air quality by encouraging drivers to switch from polluting cars to greener transport. Paris has a target to ban gas-powered cars by 2030, citing the need to tackle climate change. And, later in 2024, New York is set to conduct a first-in-nation car-reduction experiment : the launch of a long-delayed congestion charge on journeys below Manhattan's 60th Street.
I never wanted the freedom of the “Open road”, I’d like the freedom to be able to walk where I want to walk. So count me in for quitting cars.
Traffic barriers to slow down drivers and reduce crashes showed promise on Indianapolis’s east-side.
Indianapolis’s Community Heights neighborhood was part of a project that installed temporary, camo-colored barriers along a stretch of 10th St last year. It is part of a new movement called ‘tactical urbanism,’ which aims to improve public awareness of good urban design, inspire change or collect data.
Leslie Schulte, former president of Community Heights Neighborhood Organization, says new data shows it worked to improve safety.
“With our design… center median and protections for the bike lanes… that design induces drivers to obey the speed limit,” Schulte said.
More good news from the war on cars.
Guatemala City’s Central Plaza was a sea of cautious optimism on Jan. 14. But just up the street, a march organized by Indigenous leaders set out to walk towards the plaza as part of the commemoration of the inauguration of Bernardo Arévalo as the country’s next president.
The march marked the culmination of the Indigenous-led movement to defend Guatemala’s fragile democracy against attempts launched by corrupt politicians to block the ascension of Arévalo to the presidency of the Central American country. He was an academic and diplomat who became a congressional representative and then an anti-corruption presidential candidate in 2023.
Arévalo was inaugurated as the next president of Guatemala just after midnight on Jan. 15, after nearly 10 hours of delays by conservatives in Guatemala’s Congress. His inauguration followed 106 days of protests led by Mayan, Xinka and Garifuna authorities in defense of Guatemala’s democracy.
A very inspiring tale to say the least.
And now, a quick video intermission
The largest combined solar and energy-storage project in the U.S. is now online and operating in California’s Mojave Desert.
The sprawling megaproject stretches across 4,600 acres in Kern County and is located on private land as well as the Edwards Air Force Base. It’s the biggest public-private partnership the U.S. Air Force has ever been involved in.
Known as the Edwards & Sanborn project, it was developed by Terra-Gen and built by Mortenson, an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor. Construction started in the first quarter of 2021 and completion was announced last week. The project includes an astonishing 1.9 million modules from panel-maker First Solar, and 120,720 batteries from LG Chem, Samsung and BYD — which makes it the largest such project in the U.S., according to Mortenson. The equipment is connected with more than 400 miles of wire, according to Brent Bergland, Mortenson’s VP of project development.
Very cool to see this happening in my lifetime. Lets keep it up.
NKARA, Turkey -- Turkey finalized the ratification of Sweden's membership in NATO on Thursday, bringing the previously nonaligned Nordic country a step closer to joining the military alliance.
Hungary now remains the only NATO ally not to have ratified Sweden’s accession.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson welcomed Turkey's move, saying on X, formerly known as Twitter: “With this, a key milestone has been reached in Sweden’s path towards NATO membership.”
Great news for Sweden and for NATO.
One progress story that is often taken for granted is the nearly continuous lengthening of life in the past century. All over the world, people are living longer. Life expectancy numbers dipped during the Covid-19 pandemic but have already recovered in every region.
A lot of good news to be found here but the big one is that people are living longer, we got past the COVID dip.
The last inflation snapshot of 2023 provided some further encouraging news for Americans and the Federal Reserve: This painful period of sharp price increases may be nearing its end.
Commerce Department data released Friday showed that although the Federal Reserve’s preferred price gauge didn’t budge from its 2.6% annual rate seen a month before, a closely watched measurement of underlying inflation dropped to its lowest level since March 2021.
Additionally, the American household closed out 2023 on strong footing: Incomes and wages were up considerably from the year before, and consumers continued to spend heartily to keep the economy growing and casting aside recession fears.
More good news courtesy of Hopium. Don’t believe the haters, the economy is doing just fine.
In the last days of November 2023, Sacramento City Council unanimously approved a set of changes that will allow the California capital to meet its housing demands. In the 9–0 vote—complimented by a 30–0 support from public comment—the council welcomed what amounts to a new form-based code and a vision for thickening up plots within a half mile of existing and planned transit.
“This will not only help solve the housing crisis now, but it helps future-proof the city against the next housing crisis, and the one after that.” Ben Raderstorf, a policy advocate and board member of Sacramento YIMBY celebrated on X (formerly known as Twitter).
The form based code, Emily Hamann explained in the Sacramento Business Journal, would encourage density and adaptation while maintaining a sense of the neighborhood. “The changes will get rid of zoning designations that restrict the number of residential units that can be built on a lot, and instead base restrictions on the overall size of the building.”
More good news from the housing sector. Make cities livable again.
And on that note we draw the curtain on another good news roundup. See you next week friends.