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From the GNR Newsroom: It the Monday Good News Roundup [1]
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Date: 2023-01-09
Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup. We’re well into 2023 and we’ve got a bunch of good news stories to get your week, and your year, off to a good start. Special thanks as always to my collaborators Killer300 and Bhu for helping gather these articles. So lets get right into it.
The United States has long hovered on the cusp of an offshore wind energy boom, even as the industry has soared worldwide. After many fits and starts, only seven turbines are spinning off the U.S. coast, representing 0.1 percent of the total global capacity of offshore wind farms. Now that’s all starting to change. With companies hitting major milestones this year — and with more developments on deck in 2023 — momentum is building in the fledgling U.S. offshore wind industry.
Alright, love to see them windmills.
The new year is bringing energy bill savings to Kassy Allen and others in Cleveland’s first rooftop solar program designed specifically for low- and moderate-income families. City leaders and others joined Allen’s family for an official switch-flipping ceremony at her year-old home late last month. Despite gray skies and chilly temperatures, the newly installed solar panels on the roof started producing power right away. On a yearly basis, the panels should offset Allen’s electric bills by nearly 60%.
This is not only good for the environment, its just a really sweet thing to do to help people who don’t have a lot.
The FDA authorized retail pharmacies to become certified to carry mifepristone in a ruling Tuesday.
Previously, doctors and mail-order pharmacies could dispense the medication.
Walgreens and CVS are the first national pharmacies to say they will offer the pill. Walgreens and CVS said they plan to offer the abortion pill mifepristone in states where it's legal, expanding access to reproductive healthcare.
Good for Walgreens. Their paper bags may be utter flimsy crap, but their commitment to reproductive rights is laudable (seriously though the Walgreens bags are a joke).
After a five-week strike at the University of California, employed graduate students have ratified a pathbreaking new contract that offers most of them 50 or 60 percent wage hikes within the next two-and-a-half years. The agreement, which covers more than 36,000 at the ten UC campuses, was not without controversy, with some arguing it was hardly far-reaching enough. Among teaching assistants, tutors, and readers, 11,386 voted yes, with just over 7,000 voting against. Student researchers, largely in the sciences, favored the agreement more strongly, with more than ten thousand supportive and less than half that opposed.
Once again the evidence itself is apparent: Protesting works.
We have not yet seen what a Republican presidential primary looks like post-Dobbs. I expect the candidates will be asked over and over what they’ll do on abortion, in much the same way that Democratic presidential candidates are constantly pressed to outbid each other on health care policy. If all DeSantis has to offer is a ban at 15 weeks (or 12 weeks), he’ll be outbid. And if his state’s legislature sends him a ban at 6 weeks — one that would no longer meet the standard being broadly available in the first trimester — I have trouble imagining him vetoing it, reluctant though he is to make any promise on the record now. Simply noticing that you are on the wrong side of a wedge issue is not sufficient to avoid damage from the issue. Trump can’t propose a solution to the problem because it’s very difficult to solve — the party’s base voters want something that’s newly available, and nobody’s demonstrated a convincing way to win a primary while telling them they can’t have it. Yet that thing is quite unpopular, rejected even by a substantial minority of voters within the party coalition. It’s a real pickle.
It is said when the gods want to punish you they give you what you wish for. In that case, the Gods are leaning mighty heavily on the GOP right now over the abortion thing.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The South Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a ban on abortion after six weeks, ruling the restriction enacted by the Deep South state violates a state constitutional right to privacy. The decision marked a significant victory for abortion rights' advocates suddenly forced to find safeguards at the state level after the U.S. Supreme Court overtured Roe v. Wade in June.
Once again Abortion rights champions the day. We will not go back.
he Federal Trade Commission proposed a new rule Thursday to ban the use of noncompete clauses in worker contracts, a change that would significantly boost employees' negotiating powers. The proposal is based on the FTC’s finding that noncompete clauses violate its fair trade laws, with the agency calling them a “widespread and often exploitative practice that suppresses wages, hampers innovation and blocks entrepreneurs from starting new businesses.” The FTC estimates that the new rule could increase wages by some $300 billion a year.
Another big win for workers rights. Go Biden administration.
Teens these days are much better behaved than we were. In a new paper published in Social Science & Medicine, the authors document dramatic declines in the kind of behaviors that have defined teens for generations: drinking, smoking, partying, and having sex. Over the last 25 years in various high-income countries like the United States, Australia, and England: Daily cigarette smoking has declined by over 80 percent
The prevalence and frequency of drinking declined markedly between 2000 and 2015, including heavy episodic drinking
Cannabis use is down from the 1990s, but current rates vary across countries
Teens are having sex for the first time at older ages
Juvenile crime rates have declined between 40 and 80 percent
You know what’s really punk? Taking care of your body and not giving money to corporations making money off of people’s death. (Of course I say that after a night of pizza rolls and cannolis, but I’m trying okay?)
Carbon dioxide emissions in the European Union reached a 30-year low this November — upending forecasts that a surge in fossil fuel imports would do the opposite, a new report revealed. The EU’s ongoing energy crisis, driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, generated concern that a subsequent scramble for fossil fuels would cause an increase in the bloc’s emissions, according to the report released by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
More good news for the earth. These are only small improvements, but every little bit helps, we just have to keep going.
Your electronics could soon be powered by an ultra cheap sea salt battery. Researchers have built a new cheap battery with four times the energy storage capacity of lithium. Constructed from sodium-sulphur - a type of molten salt that can be processed from sea water - the battery is low-cost and more environmentally friendly than existing options. It could be a ‘breakthrough’ for renewable energy, according to lead researcher Dr Shenlong Zhao, from the University of Sydney. “Our sodium battery has the potential to dramatically reduce costs while providing four times as much storage capacity [as Lithium],” he said.
I keep saying it and it keeps being true: I love living in the future.
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act and the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act passed the Senate with bipartisan support on Thursday as amendments to the omnibus spending package. Why it matters: It's a major milestone for women's workplace civil rights. Advocates have pushed for protections for pregnant workers for over a decade, arguing that thousands of women lose their jobs each year — either fired or placed on unpaid leave — because employers are under no obligation to offer pregnant workers reasonable accommodations. Those would include things like extra bathroom breaks, the ability to sit while working a cash register or restrictions on how much weight they can lift.
A little kindness goes a long way, I’m glad to see this got passed.
Communities that have long borne the brunt of vehicle pollution are one step closer to breathing cleaner air after the Environmental Protection Agency finalized stricter emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles on Tuesday. The agency’s new rule, part of its larger Clean Trucks Plan, is the first time pollution standards for semi trucks, delivery trucks, and buses have been updated in more than 20 years. It will go into effect when 2027 vehicle models are made available for purchase. Although heavy-duty vehicles represent less than 5 percent of vehicles on the nation’s roads, they are major emitters of nitrogen oxides, a group of polluting gases that play a significant role in the formation of smog. In high concentrations, nitrogen oxides are known to contribute to heart disease, allergies, asthma, and other lung diseases.
More good news for the environment and for people with allergies and asthma.
Democracy around the world has been in decline for a decade and a half. Three big factors have driven this retreat: the rise of illiberal populist movements in the oldest democracies, including most dangerously in the United States, new democracies that failed to consolidate, and the growing power of autocratic China and Russia. 2022, however, brought some hope about the reversal of these global anti-democratic trends. All three kinds of challenges to democracy have suffered setbacks. First, populists in more established democracies did not advance, and their most anti-democratic ideas failed to gain traction. Most importantly for global democracy, the United States mid-term elections in November 2022 were mostly free, fair, and peaceful. Voter intimidation, disingenuous allegations of fraud, and calls for violent resistance to election results all occurred, but gained few followers and mobilized little anti-democratic action. This is a giant victory for democracy in the United States. And since the United States is the most powerful democracy, this positive outcome is a victory for all small d democrats around the world. Moreover, candidates backed by Mr. Trump running on “stop the steal” platforms fared poorly. It turns out that most Americans still prefer democracy to other forms of selecting their leaders.
Its been a few rough years. In 2016 when the GNR started, it was a real low point for democracy worldwide, but 2022 really feels like the year we planted our feet down, and were like “Alright, enough of that” and started turning it around. We’re tired of the hate, the cruelty, the all and out stupid meanness of it all, and we’re doing something about it.
Dancers at North Hollywood’s Star Garden Topless Dive Bar performed their final themed demonstration and picket line Nov. 5, 2022, just outside the club where they’d been on strike since March. The night’s theme, celebrating the dancers’ months on the picket line ending in a Nov. 7 union election, was “graduation.” The club’s security guards were not amused when they won the “Best Bootlickers” award; club owners Steve and Jenny Kazaryan, in absentia, won “Least Likely to Succeed (at preventing us from unionizing).” While election results are pending due to legal challenges from club owners, the dancers are confident that they will win their vote to join Actors’ Equity (a union for live theater performers). Such a victory would make Star Garden the only unionized strip club in the country — the first since The Lusty Lady in San Francisco closed in 2013.
Good for them. Strippers deserve respect like any other profession. Hope they get what they are asking for.
On New Year’s Eve, the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) announced that nearly 17,000 nurses at eight major New York hospitals planned to begin a strike January 9 if management did not meet their demands for increased staffing, fair compensation and health and safety protections. After the strike was authorized, hospitals began making substantial wage and staffing offers, leading to three bargaining units representing about 7,000 nurses settling contracts in the past week. But nurses at five hospitals, including Montefiore Medical Center, Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai Morningside, remain on the brink of what could become one of the largest nurses’ strikes in recent years.
Yep, from Hollywood to New York, from strippers to nurses, seems like everyone is catching the workers right bug, and its a great thing to see.
And on that note this weeks Monday GNR draws to a close. Have a good week, I’ll see you next Monday.
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