You know what time it is, the GNR Newsroom (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu) have all the good news stories to start your week off right, so lets get right into it.
ou might consider heat pumps to be a tantalizing climate solution (they are) and one you could adopt yourself (plenty have). But perhaps you’ve held off on getting one, wondering how much of a difference they really make if a dirty grid is supplying the electricity you’re using to power them — that is, a grid whose electricity is generated at least in part by fossil gas, coal or oil.
That’s certainly the case for most U.S. households: While the grid mix is improving, it’s still far from clean. In 2023, renewable energy sources provided just 21% of U.S. electricity generation, with carbon-free nuclear energy coming in at 19%. The other 60% of power came from burning fossil fuels.
So do electric heat pumps really lower emissions if they run on dirty grid power?
The answer is an emphatic yes. Even on a carbon-heavy diet, heat pumps eliminate tons of emissions annually compared to other heating systems.
One of the main threats against stopping climate change is ignorance, Heat Pumps can help the environment even on a dirty grid, don’t be misled or misinformed.
HLA requires that, during street repaving, the city must implement bus, bike and walk improvements in the city's Mobility Plan, which was approved in 2015 and 2016 but remains predominantly unimplemented. In the Mobility Plan, the city adopted a Vision Zero policy to eliminate traffic deaths by 2035 - but in recent years traffic deaths have risen to their highest levels in decades, generating impetus for HLA's passage.
Streetsblog L.A. endorsed HLA, which assembled a broad range of endorsements, including six of fifteen L.A. City Councilmembers. The measure was opposed by the city firefighters union, alongside just one City Councilmember (Traci Park), and some marginal pro-car groups (some based outside the city).
The streets of LA just became a little bit safer.
WASHINGTON — When anti-abortion-rights activists drafted a lawsuit seeking to overturn federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, they filed it in a court in Texas where they were guaranteed a judge who they thought would be friendly to their point of view.
That judge, Amarillo-based Matthew Kacsmaryk, who was once a conservative legal activist and was appointed by former President Donald Trump, subsequently ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, prompting outcry and further litigation. The case is now before the Supreme Court.
The approach the lawyers at the Christian conservative Alliance Defending Freedom took in that case, known as "judge-shopping," will be harder to pull off after the federal judiciary changed policy Tuesday.
The U.S. Judicial Conference approved a new policy at its biannual meeting that would ensure that any cases seeking to block state or federal policies in federal district courts would be assigned randomly from larger pools of judges.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who had complained about the issue, welcomed the move.
Good, people shouldn’t be able to cheat their way to victory just by picking the right judge.
The superintendent of a Texas school district has been suspended after a transgender student was removed — and then later reinstated — from a role in a high school production of "Oklahoma!"
The Sherman Independent School District School Board of Trustees voted Friday to suspend Superintendent Tyson Bennett during a closed session. Meghan Cone, a spokesperson for the district, confirmed Tuesday that the decision was related to an investigation into the trans student's removal from the musical.
Bennett did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The student, Max Hightower, a senior at Sherman High School, was removed in November from the lead male role in “Oklahoma!” after his family was notified of a new policy about casting by gender.
“There is no policy on how students are assigned to roles. As it relates to this particular production, the sex of the role as identified in the script will be used when casting,” the district said in a statement on Nov. 6.
I’m glad that creep is gone, and I’m glad Max got to be in the play after all.
WASHINGTON — Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., who frequently defied his own party and announced last fall he would not seek re-election, said Tuesday he will resign from Congress at the end of next week, further shrinking the GOP's already razor-thin majority.
"Today I am announcing that I will depart Congress at the end of next week," Buck said in a statement. "I look forward to staying involved in our political process, as well as spending more time in Colorado and with my family."
His departure will cut the House Republican margin to 218-213; Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., will continue to have two votes to spare before needing Democrats to govern. But illnesses and other unexpected absences could make his already difficult job even more challenging.
And another rat flees the sinking ship that is the GOP. They all know what’s coming, and none of them want to be around for it.
The anti-abortion movement is turning on Republican lawmakers who support bills to protect in vitro fertilization, accusing them of sanctioning murder.
As many politicians raced in recent weeks to get to the right side of public opinion on IVF, some of the country’s biggest and most influential anti-abortion groups are pushing back.
Several have attacked state and federal lawmakers — who introduced legislation to protect IVF after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that frozen embryos are children — for giving doctors a “license to kill” and said legislators’ efforts would result in “thousands of dead human beings.”
Other groups are going further, running ads against longstanding GOP allies that use the same graphic imagery — blood, babies and scalpels — they have long deployed to oppose Democrats and the abortion-rights movement.
Yep, even the Anti Abortion groups think the GOP have gone too far with this latest absurdity. Remember it was never about protecting children, it was about controlling women and seeing children as some sort of fucked up virility score card.
New apartment construction in Austin is on the uptick.
The big picture: The skyrocketing cost of housing is at least partly a supply issue, as Austin's population ballooned with coastal tech-industry emigres during a pandemic that reconceived where we could work.
Yes, but: The latest city data released in September shows Austin is falling further and further behind on its 2017 goal of 60,000 new affordable homes by 2027.
- In 2021, the city produced just 1,619 units affordable to households earning 80% median family or below, far short of the annual goal of 6,000 units.
What's next: The Austin City Council last week gave the go-ahead to redevelop the city-owned HealthSouth tract just east of the Texas State Capitol, a big step for a project slated to include 232 units of affordable housing.
yes! Affordable housing comes to Austin, lets spread it everywhere.
But Republicans’ willingness to bow to Trump on nearly every issue is making their party staggeringly unpopular with voters — and not just the rank and file. Colorado Rep. Ken Buck stunned Capitol Hill on Tuesday by announcing that he’d simply had enough of Trumpism and would resign in just about a week. In an interview with CNN, Buck slammed Congress as “dysfunctional” and remarked that many of his constituents were sick of Trump.
It isn’t just Buck who’s had enough of Trump’s constant demands for loyalty and submission. Some of the party’s biggest fundraisers are already sitting on the electoral sidelines rather than raise or donate a penny to Trump. Now Newsweek reports that Lara Trump’s RNC takeover is driving even lifelong RNC financiers out of the party.
With Trump about to turn the RNC into his personal ATM and donors abandoning the party in droves, Republicans could enter the heat of the 2024 campaign season unable to compete in a host of critical swing races. That’s going to be a real problem, because GOP candidates have a lot of ground to make up if they want to hold onto their jobs.
Polling from January finds that American voters oppose most of Trump’s far-right policies. Somewhere between 20 percent and 30 percent of Republican voters now say they would not vote for Trump under any circumstances. Trump’s popularity among women has fallen by 5 percent according to a new Quinnipiac poll, in no small part due to his repeated verbal attacks on his sexual abuse victim, writer E. Jean Carroll. Problems like that take a lot of campaign money to solve — money that likely will instead be redirected into the pockets of Trump’s criminal defense attorneys.
Trump is like Pervatin (which is a drug which is essentially a mix of cocaine and meth, which was all the rage with Nazi’s in the 40’s). He gave a huge boost to the GOP when they initially took him, but they got hooked, and quite frankly, they pretty much sealed their fates the second they started dabbing with that stuff.
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.
This week, the House of Representatives passed a bill to force a divestment of TikTok from entities affiliated with the Chinese government. The vote was overwhelming, with 90% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats assenting.
Yeah, I know that the Tik Tok ban seems kinda sketchy, but lets be real Tik Tok is basically a spy machine you install on your phone. I wont use it for that reason, hopefully this helps fix that problem.
If you were to guess, by about how much did energy-related CO2 emissions fall in advanced economies between 2022 and 2023? (Energy-related doesn’t include emissions from such things as cattle, landfills and incineration plants, and certain manufacturing processes.)
- 5 percent
- 10 percent
- 2 percent
- Trick question; they didn’t fall
The correct answer is A, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
In 1973, when emissions from advanced economies were comparably low, the Sydney Opera House had just opened, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon had just come out, and the United States Supreme Court had just ruled on Roe v. Wade—the first time around.
More great news regarding CO2 emissions dropping, lets keep it up.
Former Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) declared on Thursday that “there are crazy people” now running the Republican National Committee following the installation of Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump as its new co-chair.
“And it’s going to get worse,” Jolly predicted to MSNBC’s Katie Phang.
Lara Trump, who is married to the former president’s son Eric Trump, has called for vast changes in how Americans vote, advocating for single-day voting, paper ballots, the requirement of voter IDs and more.
Phang noted how Republicans are saying their plans “all out loud.”
“They don’t care who is listening,” she told Jolly. “I mean, David, this is not funny.”
Yeah pretty much.
Plus I think all those voting changes would hurt them more than they think, since a lot of their voters are, you know, old people.
ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Students and teachers can discuss sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida classrooms, provided it’s not part of instruction, under a settlement reached Monday between Florida education officials and civil rights attorneys who had challenged a state law which critics dubbed “Don’t Say Gay.”
The settlement clarifies what is allowed in Florida classrooms following passage two years ago of the law prohibiting instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in early grades. Opponents said the law had created confusion about whether teachers could identity themselves as LGBTQ+ or if they even could have rainbow stickers in classrooms.
Other states used the Florida law as a template to pass prohibitions on classroom instruction on gender identity or sexual orientation. Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and North Carolina are among the states with versions of the law.
Under the terms of the settlement, the Florida Board of Education will send instructions to every school district saying the Florida law doesn’t prohibit discussing LGBTQ+ people, nor prevent anti-bullying rules on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or disallow Gay-Straight Alliance groups. The settlement also spells out that the law is neutral — meaning what applies to LGBTQ+ people also applies to heterosexual people — and that it doesn’t apply to library books not being used for instruction in the classroom.
And for our last story this morningt we see a mass slashing and neutering of the once dread “Don’t say gay” bill, which is still pretty bad, but its been made less bad. Yet another faceplant from Florida Governor and useless useless human being Ron DeSantis. Go away and be forgotten DeSantis.
But don’t you go away too far, cause we will be back next week with more good news.