Hey all its that time again, Me, Killer300 and Bhu bringing you good stories to start your week off. I’m actually currently suffering a cold so I’m not feeling my best, so forgive the short intro lets get right into it.
The world is betting big on hydrogen, which might just be the best way to eliminate fossil fuels from essential industries like aviation and steelmaking. But for hydrogen to actually decarbonize anything, it needs to be more or less emissions-free — “clean,” if you like.
Its availability also needs to dramatically increase. Today, clean hydrogen barely exists.
Like the age of Aquarius, only with less singing hippies (Or you can keep the singing hippies you do you, whatever).
Inflammation is bad, and, like many things, cycling has a role to play.
Had a low back issue? Or maybe an allergic reaction to medication? Likely, inflammation, which causes an array of ailments, and has been linked to much worse medical issues such as arthritis and cancer, was at work. To stem the inflammation tide, we pop ibuprofen and other over-the-counter meds, but we also do things like plunging our bodies into frigid bodies of water. Cold plunging has become immensely popular for one reason: inflammation.
So, what if we told you that riding your beloved bicycle to work, alongside countless other benefits, also helps with inflammation? Does it beat plunging into ice water? For many, the answer is surely a resounding yes. Cue the study.
A recent Finnish study published in the European Journal of Public Health looked into how walking or cycling to work, known as active commuting, might affect our health. The study involved over 6,000 working adults in Finland and found some interesting connections between this kind of commuting and our body’s inflammation levels.
A good excuse to break out the old bicycle if you have one.
A Complete Street project in the pipeline since before President Barack Obama’s first term is gearing up to actually start happening—with growing pains for Buckhead motorists expected in the short term.
Plans for the Piedmont Road Complete Street project were first cooked up by the Buckhead Community Improvement District as part of the 2008 Piedmont Area Transportation Plan.
After 15 years and the completion of designs by Croy Engineering, Buckhead CID officials report this week the Complete Streets overhaul is officially underway.
The Piedmont Road blocks in question span from Peachtree Road to Lenox Road, a section of central Buckhead where high-rise office and multifamily developments such as Terminus and Modera Prominence have brought hundreds of new residents in recent years.
Make cities livable again.
OCEANSIDE, Calif. — Once again, train service between San Diego and Orange County is suspended because of another landslide in San Clemente.
The coastal slide dumped rocks and debris on the tracks Wednesday.
Amtrak Pacific Surfliner and Metrolink Orange County stopped service between the Oceanside and Laguna Niguel-Mission Viejo stations.
Frustrated passengers at the Oceanside Transit Center hurried to catch shuttle buses to get to their destinations Thursday morning.
The rail closure comes as Congressman Mike Levin (CA-49) and other officials announced new funding to tackle coastal erosion issues which continue to effect the LOSSAN Rail Corridor from San Diego to Los Angeles and farther north.
“This is the second busiest rail corridor in the entire country,” said Levin.
Through a federal grant program, the North County Transit District is getting nearly $54 million to replace the San Dieguito River Railway Bridge in Del Mar.
Lets make trains viable again.
From DeSantis’ relentless attacks on the LGBTQ community to higher education to Disney, not to mention his signature on a new ban on abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy, the governor has managed to alienate and enrage large sections of the electorate who could have been helpful in his current and future presidential prospects.
Even more troubling for any of DeSantis’ future hopes is the question mark about how conservatives see him. A bad sign is that the two most senior Republican officials in the state – Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott – were unwilling to lend their support to DeSantis’ flailing campaign, endorsing Trump instead.
DeSantis is terrible and needs to go away forever. Lets make that happen.
These students live in a state that has banned more books than nearly any other, according to PEN America. The Texas State Board of Education passed a policy in late 2023 prohibiting what it calls "sexually explicit, pervasively vulgar or educationally unsuitable books in public schools." Over the past two years, Texas teachers have lost jobs or been pressured to resign after making challenged books available to students.
The teacher who created this bookshelf could become a target for far right-wing groups. That's why NPR is not naming her, nor her students.
This is really cool. Stick it to the man kids and teachers.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The rumors about vote fraud started swirling as the ballots in Taiwan’s closely watched presidential election were tallied on Jan. 13. There were baseless claims that people had fabricated votes and that officials had miscounted and skewed the results.
In a widely shared video, a woman recording votes mistakenly enters one in the column for the wrong candidate. The message was clear: The election could not be trusted. The results were faked.
It could have been Taiwan’s Jan. 6 moment. But it wasn’t.
Worries that China would use disinformation to undermine the integrity of Taiwan’s vote dogged the recent election, a key moment in the young democracy’s development that highlighted tensions with its much larger neighbor.
Authoritarian assholes always try and crush elections they don’t like the results of, this time its not working.
A new refinery in Georgia is about to churn out millions of gallons of jet fuel — except the fuel will be made not from petroleum but from plants.
On Wednesday, LanzaJet marked the opening of its Freedom Pines Fuels facility, which uses novel technology to convert ethanol into sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF. The $200 million biorefinery is the first in the world to deploy an “alcohol-to-jet” process, one that the company claims can curb greenhouse gas emissions by over 70 percent compared to conventional jet fuel.
The plant “is proof of the energy transition accelerating in real time,” said Jennifer Holmgren, the board chair of LanzaJet, which spun out of the Illinois-based company LanzaTech in 2020.
Once again, I love living in the future.
It’s no secret that the environmental health of the planet is in dire straits right now. The Earth was its hottest in recorded history in 2023. Our winters are shorter, our summers hotter, and our natural disasters more extreme.
The doom and gloom around climate change is understandable when you take it all into account. Global governments struggled to stay under the goal of 1.5 Celsius temperature increase last year, meaning we could be barreling toward even worse outcomes. There’s a sense of existential dread, a feeling that we’ve gone too far and that there’s no stopping the inevitable demise of Earth and all the creatures that inhabit it, including us.
But one expert says it doesn’t have to be that way. Hannah Ritchie — deputy editor at Our World in Data — argues that climate “doomerism” leads people astray from meaningful action. In her debut book, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, she says we should reframe the way we talk about climate change. Hope, informed by data, can be a helpful tool for mobilizing the masses, who range from climate deniers to the most devoted of environmentalists.
“I think tailoring messaging to different audiences is really, really crucial,” the Future Perfect 50 honoree says. “I think some people do actually just respond to the fear or the catastrophic messages. But I think there’s also a big group of people that don’t like that. I’m trying to bridge that ground a little bit and get people that might be on the fence or a bit disengaged to engage a bit more.”
I mean that’s pretty much the entire point of the GNR. You never get anything done by moping and wallowing in despair.
I wrote you two days ago with provisional good news—it looked as if the long and deep fight to rein in runaway LNG export growth had scored a huge victory. The succeeding 48 hours have been full of joy, because that news turned out to be entirely true. As the White House confirmed with the official release of its policy at 5 a.m. this morning, all new licenses for LNG export terminals are hereby halted, until the policies used to figure out if they’re in the “public interest” can be updated to include modern economics and science.
That this is a huge victory can’t be said strongly enough—for the people in the Gulf who have fought so long and hard (it was such fun to join Roishetta Ozane et al in a press conference this morning), and for the planet. This is the biggest check any president has ever applied to the fossil fuel industry, and the strongest move against dirty energy in American history. And if you have any doubts, check out the tears of outrage from Big Oil. (Fox News coverage here, if you’re experienced in handling schadenfreude).
Lets hear it once again for Biden
owa lawmakers declined to advance a bill Thursday that would remove gender identity from the state’s civil rights law.
All three members of a subcommittee voted to not advance the bill Wednesday. The bill was referred to the Iowa House Judiciary Committee last week.
The bill would have removed gender identity as a protected class under the Iowa Civil Rights Act. However, it would have also added “a diagnosis for gender dysphoria or any condition related to a gender identity disorder to the definition of ‘disability'” to the law.
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a pro-LGBTQ advocacy group, celebrated the bill’s failure to advance in a Thursday post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Good news out of Iowa, but keep your eyes peeled, the GOP never misses a trick and they will try again.
The Oregon Supreme Court ruled Thursday that 10 GOP state senators cannot run for reelection after they refused to attend Senate sessions for about six weeks out of protest last year in an attempt to stall Democratic-backed bills.
The court ruling upholds a secretary of state decision to keep the lawmakers off 2024 ballots, citing a 2022 referendum that bars lawmakers from seeking reelection if they have more than 10 unexcused absences.
The six-week boycott of the session stopped work and prevented voting, the longest such freeze in the state’s history. The absent lawmakers demanded legislative concessions in exchange for their return.
Republicans control a minority of the state Senate, 12 of the body’s 30 seats. By walking out, the Senate could not reach a quorum and conduct votes.
Speaking of, nice demonstration of how petty these little shits are, they had no other way to stop reforms getting passed so they just…..didn’t do their jobs. Presumably to tend their sour grape farms. Well good news boys you don’t want to do your job so bad now you don’t have to. Ever again.
Earlier this month, Fateh announced the People Over Parking Act, a bill to eliminate parking requirements across the whole state. He explained how a church in his Minneapolis district was able to be converted to affordable housing after the city’s policy change. This time around, Meyer bought 130 parking policy textbooks for members of the state legislature; a plastic table in the State Capitol building buckled under their weight.
Make cities livable again.
What is occurring at the extreme edges is in contrast to Americans’ general attitudes, which are by and large neutral toward all religious groups. They are warmer toward Jews, mainline Protestants, and Catholics than toward evangelical Christians, Mormons, Muslims, and atheists, but still, neutral on the whole.
And, six in ten Americans have a friend who belongs to a different religion than they do.
I wouldn’t call this a utopia of religious harmony, but I do think it well meets the threshold for religious tolerance. There’s no argument that we are on the whole less tolerant than we were in, say, the 1950s, when the US was far less religiously diverse than it is now.
Since we don’t have much data going further back than even the early millennium, one place where we can see this change reflected is in our politics.
In 2015 and 2019, Gallup asked Americans if they would be willing to vote for a qualified candidate of various categories, from Hispanic to Muslim to socialist. By 2019, higher percentages of Americans were willing to vote for a qualified presidential candidate in all of the categories except one—socialist.
A collection of more good news articles from one of our sister good news aggregates. Enjoy.
The new Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly jobs report has dropped and it’s a really big one!!!!!
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353,000 new jobs, with upward revisions 479,000 new jobs altogether, unemployment rate 3.7%. With 1.3 jobs available per unemployed persons (way above historic norms), and the prime age worker participation rate above pre-pandemic levels, the US continues to experience one of the strongest labor markets in modern American history and certainly the best since the 1960s. A majority of Americans have never been alive in a job market this strong and robust.
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Average hourly earnings were up 0.6% in January, which is more than 7% annually - a really big and encouraging number. With inflation running between 2.5% and 3.5% the real wage gains Americans are experiencing right now are some of the most significant in generations. Note that groceries have only risen by 1.3% over the past year, well below the wage gains we are seeing.
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Despite enormous challenges - COVID, insurrection, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, global inflation, repeated OPEC price hikes, war in the Middle East - the performance of the American economy over the past year has been remarkable. GDP growth has been 4.1% over the last two quarters, our recovery from COVID has been the strongest in the G7, the stock market is at all time highs, wage growth remains very strong and outpacing inflation, consumer confidence is rising, sharply. Things were hard in recent years, but they are much better now. We are getting there, together, and Joe Biden now has a very strong case for re-election.
Great news for America and for Biden.
And I think that’s a good point to end for the week. Everyone have a better Monday than I am having, and I will see you next week.