Hey everybody, its that time of the week again, myself, Killer300 and Bhu have been hard at work finding news stories for you, so lets jump right in.
ARVADA, Colorado — On a gray Saturday, I pull up to the curb of the Geos neighborhood during a snowstorm. Through the fat falling flakes, I can just make out the multicolored buildings that look modern, attractive — and, frankly, normal.
But these homes are special in a crucial, planet-friendly way: They don’t burn fossil fuels.
Geos is an all-electric neighborhood of 28 homes boasting energy-efficient designs. And although they do occasionally pull dirty electricity from the grid, their rooftop solar panels harvest enough renewable energy to offset their grid use over the year — making them net-zero homes.
That’s unusual. Most homes today are climate liabilities, not boons. A staggering nine out of 10 U.S. housing units need to have their fossil-fueled equipment swapped for electric replacements if the nation is going to decarbonize fast enough to avoid climate catastrophe.
The Geos community shows one vision for the all-electric homes of the future, resident Dar-Lon Chang tells me.
I talk about how much I love living in the future, these guys are already there.
California and Texas have a new clean-energy superlative to compete over: who’s got the most grid batteries.
Last year, Texas overtook California in large-scale solar power capacity. When huge amounts of solar power rush onto the grid, batteries tend to follow. Now, Texas is building more grid batteries than California, the longtime undisputed leader in clean energy storage.
Developers are expected to complete 6.4 gigawatts of new grid battery capacity in Texas this year, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. That’s more than double the 5.6 gigawatts of battery capacity it ended 2023 with. It’s also as much battery capacity as the entire United States built last year, which was a record year for the energy storage industry. The projection outpaces the 5.2 gigawatts set to come online in California.
The surge of batteries in these states underscores the fact that energy storage is an increasingly major part of the country’s transitioning electricity system. The U.S. is slated to add 14.3 gigawatts of battery storage overall this year; that represents 23% of all new power plant capacity. Climate analysts have long called for massive storage expansion to facilitate a shift to low-carbon energy — now it’s finally starting to happen.
Great news because, as the past few years have demonstrated, Texas’ power grid needs all the help it can get, glad to hear they are taking steps to modernize it.
Clackamas County in Oregon, one of two counties into which Portland extends, has reduced the rate of homelessness by 65% from 2019 to 2023, a number that officials say reflects a more comprehensive strategy.
According to Clackamas County’s quarterly report on the Supportive Housing Services (SHS) outcomes, the county has rehoused 314 people in six months.
429 people and 223 homeless households were placed in permanent supportive housing, exceeding the stated goal for the period by 20.
“[J]ust over the last couple of months, we’ve placed 30 households in the Rapid Rehousing program through the support of housing services,” said Melissa Erlbaum, executive director of Clackamas Women’s Services. “We’re doing amazing work and partnership with the county.”
According to KATU News, officials also said in the report that SHS prevented 1,369 people, and 591 households from being evicted, which they added is one of the chief strategies for reducing the number of homeless on the street; provide assistance to people on the precipice of homelessness.
Very good news indeed.
The Biden administration, leaders of four Columbia River Basin tribes and the governors of Oregon and Washington celebrated on Friday as they signed papers formally launching a $1 billion plan to help recover depleted salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest.
The plan, announced in December, stopped short of calling for the removal of four controversial dams on the Snake River, as some environmental groups and tribal leaders have urged. But officials said it would boost clean energy production and help offset hydropower, transportation and other benefits provided by the dams should Congress ever agree to breach them.
Biden does it again, this time he’s rescuing salmon populations. Is there anything he can’t do?
Usually, however, they fail. Weyland contends that the many instances where populists hold power and liberal democracy emerges intact, such as Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy and Carlos Menem’s Argentina, are given short shrift by scholars. Comparing those cases of democratic resilience with the minority of cases where democracy fell under populist rule, Weyland detects several patterns that should temper fears of a Trumpian autocracy in the United States.
First, democracies with a strong separation of powers between different institutions and branches of government were especially difficult to overthrow. But rickety institutions can also be a major obstacle, Weyland argues. A would-be authoritarian must achieve overwhelming popularity to set them aside. That’s possible only if one or more crises hit and the populist successfully resolves them, or — in the case of left-wing populists in Latin America — a resource bonanza enables massive expansion in government largesse.
For all the complaints about “counter-majoritarian” features of the U.S. Constitution, such as the Senate and the Supreme Court, it’s precisely this division of authority that stands in the way of the democratic backsliding highlighted in other countries. Raw majoritarianism makes it easier for populists in power to rewrite the rules to suppress their opposition. As Weyland notes, Hungary — the most prominent example of revived authoritarianism in the West — “constituted Eastern Europe’s ‘most majoritarian’ democracy” before Orban won office.
The basic gist here seems to be “We survived four years of this dipshit already, we can survive another four.” That being said I really DON’T want to have to survive four more years of this shithead. So please make sure to vote for Biden in November.
Music is one of the few mediums that can often transcend taboo, language differences and societal stratification.
Global Voices interviewed Halldor Kristínarson, founder of the activism and music journalism project Shouts – Music from the Rooftops! about his work, the role of music in making meaningful change, and starting conversations.
At Shouts, Hallador routinely covers issues such as Indigenous music preservation, sexism in the music industry, and civil disobedience through song.
Music has always been a force for social change.
Yet our work with faith-based, pro-immigration advocacy groups points toward a different reality. As we argue in our new book, co-authored with sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen, “God’s Resistance: Mobilizing Faith to Defend Immigrants,” faith leaders, including some evangelicals, are central to the current movement to protect immigrant rights, and they have been for over a hundred years.
Remember, the assholes who bandy around religion as an excuse to harm people are the minority. Look for the helpers.
Baltimore has become what many consider to be ground zero in the emerging “solidarity economy” and the formation of worker-owned, cooperatively run businesses. There’s something important going on here, and there’s a lot that we can all learn from our fellow workers who are in the cooperative space — people who are living, breathing proof that there’s another way to run a business, that there’s another way to run our economy, and that there are other ways we can treat work and workers. At a recent event hosted by the Baltimore Museum of Industry titled “Work Matters: Building a Worker-Owned Co-op,” Max moderated a panel including workers and representatives from Common Ground Bakery Café, Taharka Bros Ice Cream, A Few Cool Hardware Stores, and the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED). He talked to them about how they came to work at these different co-ops, how their businesses transitioned to more cooperative models, and they dig into the nitty gritty of what working at a co-op looks like, what it takes for workers to democratically run a business, and the real challenges, limitations, and rewards that come with this kind of work. Panelists include: Vince Green (Taharka Bros Ice Cream); David Evans (A Few Cool Hardware Stores); Craig Smith (A Few Cool Hardware Stores); Sierra Allen (Common Ground Bakery Café); Christa Daring (BRED).
They always say we don’t want to work. But the truth is we just don’t want to work for shitty bosses.
Alex Honnold is no stranger to challenges. Most famously, in 2017, he became the only person to have climbed Yosemite National Park’s 3,000-foot vertical rock formation, El Capitan, without ropes or harnesses, a feat chronicled in the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo.
Last summer, Honnold completed another impressive feat: the first ascent of Ingmikortilaq, a 3,750-foot rock face in Greenland, near the Arctic Circle. That climb was part of an expedition to gather critical data on the impact of climate change in the region. Honnold was accompanied by glaciologist Heïdi Sevestre, who collected ice and rock samples for research on ice melt and glacier loss. The journey was documented in Arctic Ascent, a National Geographic series that follows the group as they explore some of the most remote landscapes on Earth.
Leading a scientific expedition may be a new turn for Honnold in his decades of rock climbing, but he’s long been concerned about climate change. He took an interest in environmental nonfiction early on — Bill McKibben’s 2010 book Eaarth particularly resonated with him. “I remember that idea sticking with me — that in my lifetime, what I think of as Earth will no longer be the same,” he says, referring to climate impacts such as worsening wildfires, droughts and storms.
This is a really cool turn of events. Its like a DnD adventure to save the environment.
Ok, now on to the merger challenge itself, and the explosively popular political response to what the FTC just did. The case is simple. Kroger and Albertsons, if they combine, will raise consumer prices and lower wages. And these are already extremely big chains who have themselves done massive acquisitions. The FTC provided some graphics in its complaint showing the many mergers that built the two chains. Here’s Kroger:
For personal reasons I’d rather not get into, this one really hits close to home for me.
Last week, a federal public health endeavor many have never heard of released a wealth of data—275 million previously undiscovered DNA variants, found in the genome sequences of 250,000 Americans who had volunteered to help advance biomedical research. Half of them were racial and ethnic minorities.
The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) All of Us program, which aims to gather genetic data from one million Americans by 2026, is unprecedented in its diversity and scale. Their latest release is a significant addition to a pool of genomic data that has been overly drawn from participants of European ancestry, a step toward ensuring that precision medicine will be an innovation beneficial to everyone, and a rare sign of trust between the public and government health agencies.
Alright! New DNA variants just dropped *Air guitar riff*
Also as you already know WCGR is a great source of good news every week.
One of the Inflation Reduction Act’s most potentially transformative programs is close to being finalized — and now we have a window into how it could take shape.
States are vying for a share of a historic $7 billion in federal funding to help low-income families access clean solar power. This program, Solar for All, is poised to benefit more than 700,000 low-income households across the nation, according to a new analysis from the nonprofit Clean Energy States Alliance, shared exclusively with Canary Media.
Neat, I like that. Solar for all.
In Mozambique’s northernmost province of Cabo Delgado, multinational giants TotalEnergies, ExxonMobil, Eni and others are developing three liquid natural gas, or LNG, projects. They will cost $50 billion, making them the largest LNG projects in Africa. Only one of these projects has started gas extraction, and already the industry has brought devastating consequences for communities, the land and climate — and has pushed the poor country further into debt.
However, the industry has a thorn in its side: the international Say No to Gas! campaign, which won’t let it get away with its actions without a fight.
The will of the people cannot be denied.
Rocks and hotness have existed for billions of years, but it’s only now that the two can be used to help the world decarbonize — and it’s all because the insanely low cost of solar and wind power has made thermal storage economically possible.
In essential industries such as steel, cement and chemicals production, the massive amount of energy needed to heat stuff up makes up a big part of their emissions footprints and production costs. Heavy industry accounts for over one-quarter of global emissions, and nearly 17 percent of all energy used by industry in the U.S. is for heating things and generating steam.
And for another essential industry to truly decarbonize — the power sector — 24/7 clean energy is needed; renewable energy credits and intermittent renewables paired with short-duration batteries won’t cut it.
Yep, I still love living in the future.
A Montana court has blocked three anti-abortion laws from taking effect, which would have banned abortion at 20 weeks, prohibited doctors from prescribing medication abortion through telehealth, required 24-hour waiting periods to have medication abortions, and required ultrasounds to be performed prior to an abortion. These laws were originally passed and signed into law by Montana’s Republican-majority legislature in 2021 but were temporarily blocked by a court injunction in October of that year.
District Court Judge Kurt Krueger wrote on Thursday that the laws in question imposed a significant burden on abortion access while also infringing on women’s state Constitutional right to access abortion prior to fetal viability, as established by a Montana Supreme Court ruling from 1999. Thursday’s ruling further specifies that “fetal viability” isn’t an arbitrary gestational marker, but something that should be determined by medical professionals rather than the state. “Courts are particularly wary of ideological or sectarian legislation presented as healthcare interests,” the ruling says.
Abortion continues to be a massive millstone around the neck of the GOP, once it was their strongest unifier and wedge issue, but ever since the repeal of Roe V Wade its been dragging the GOP down like a boat anchor made of dwarf star matter.
Walgreens and CVS, two of the largest U.S. pharmacy chains, plan to start offering abortion pills this month, the companies told Axios Friday.
Why it matters: The move will increase availability to mifepristone just as the Supreme Court is set to weigh access to the pill in a high-stakes case that marks the top court's first major abortion issue since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
- The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on March 26 in a dispute over access to mifepristone, with a ruling expected by late June.
The big picture: The two chains received the required certification to dispense mifepristone under the Food and Drug Administration's regulatory change issued last year.
- They'll start rolling out the medication in a handful of states where abortion is legal.
What they're saying: Walgreens said it expects to begin dispensing within a week, consistent with federal and state laws, in select locations in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, California and Illinois.
And in the greater scheme of things the GOP’s war against abortion is a losing one, in more ways than one.
And on that note I think we’re done for the week, I will see you all on Monday, happy days till then.