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From the GNR Newsroom: Its the Monday Good News Roundup [1]
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Date: 2023-01-30
Its that time once again friends, time for the Monday Good News roundup, brought to you by the GNR Newsroom (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu). We got a lot of great stories for you so lets get right into it.
In August of 2022, Lexington, Kentucky, eliminated minimum parking mandates from the city code. In the past, this is a move city leaders might have found difficult to make, citing a lack of precedent or a concern that local businesses may suffer. But many cities that have successfully removed minimum parking requirements are giving decisionmakers the information they need to act. Municipalities like Lexington have for years based a site’s number of parking stalls on anything from the building’s square footage, to number of bedrooms, to restaurant seats. In places like Anchorage, Nashville, and Fayetteville, these provisions have inhibited businesses from renovating, rehabilitating, or repurposing commercial buildings without incurring the costs of parking they wouldn’t necessarily want or need. At their most destructive, such policies can ruin small towns like Sandpoint, Idaho, and exacerbate housing shortages—and, as Tony Jordan of the Parking Reform Network noted, ceding “so much space to cars reinforces car dependency.”
Another win for affordable housing. That’s always good news.
Nonviolent action is an art, a science and a toolbox for making change. With over 300 methods of waging struggle — from street art to strikes, boycotts to blockades — and millions of people engaging with it, nonviolent action is innovative, unexpected and sometimes laugh-out-loud surprising. If nonviolent struggle has a bread-and-butter item, it’s protests. They’re everywhere. They can be so routine, in fact, that the news media often yawns and ignores them. But instead of “yet another boring protest,” people can infuse their ideas with a little creativity — and come up with something unforgettable — and impossible to ignore. Here are some stories collected in Nonviolence News (many via Waging Nonviolence’s excellent reporting) throughout 2022. They reveal how protest can be a many-splendored thing, a tool that achieves a multitude of goals. Protests can startle people awake and make sure the injustice is noticed — such as when Anonymous wired Russia security systems to sound alarms whenever the air raid sirens went off in Ukraine. They can call upon people to take action (like the Indigenous-led light projection calling on people to boycott a racist hotel in South Dakota).
What’s better than protesting? Interesting protesting that gets a lot of attention.
Several Florida students say they plan to sue the state and Gov. Ron DeSantis over the state's rejection of the Advanced Placement African American studies course in state schools. "If he does not negotiate with the College Board to allow AP African American studies to be taught in classrooms across the state of Florida, that these three young people will be the lead plaintiffs," said civil rights attorney Ben Crump at a Wednesday press conference.
Ugh, Desantis. That guy really grinds my gears. I hope those kids do well in their lawsuit.
Television provider DirecTV has dropped conservative channel Newsmax from its lineup after a dispute over carrier fees, a decision the network is calling an act of political censorship. DirecTV’s current contract with Newsmax expired on Tuesday evening, after the television provider said it was unwilling to agree to carrier fees proposed by the conservative channel.
Good, de-platform far right propaganda channels. Granted its only for a contract dispute, but I’ll take it.
Twitter has suspended the account of white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes less than 24 hours after his reinstatement on the platform. Fuentes posted a picture of his suspended account on Telegram on Wednesday morning, with the caption, “Well it was fun while it lasted.”
I see that Elon Musk’s dedication to making Twitter a more and more horrible place is going forward as planned. Like seriously Elon, what did you think was gonna happen?
The doubters may be right. The conflict has lasted longer than many regional wars, and no victory or retreat is in sight. Predictions merit only guarded confidence when so many have proven wrong, e.g., that Kyiv could fall within days or Russia would quickly gain air superiority over Ukraine. Policymakers might be prudent, however, to consider not only possibilities of a long war but also how it might end sooner.
I hope Ukraine wins, but whatever happens this entire mess has been a disaster for Putin. His image as the evil mastermind has been shot to hell, and he stands revealed as another pathetic, grasping autocrat unfit to run a used car dealership nevermind a country.
We are in a period of global democratic decline. One report last year found that half of the world’s democracies are experiencing democratic backsliding. Another, that the “last 30 years of democratic advances” have now been “eradicated.” But a fascinating new paper from associate professors at the University of Virginia and University of California, Berkeley, says that the story of global democratic decline becomes one of democratic stability if we look further into how indicators of democratic health are measured. Let’s get into it! The recent reports that found evidence of global democratic backsliding, the paper’s authors, Anne Meng and Andrew Little, wrote, “rely heavily if not entirely on subjective indicators”—a team of expert coders that use media reports, academic studies, and personal experience to gauge democracy’s forward or backward movement. But it’s possible, Meng and Little think, that these coders’ “standards and biases” have changed over time, leading to harsher judgments now that we have much more information than we used to about democratic violations. These experts may have also been influenced by expanding media coverage and conversation around the poor state of democracies after the United States’ shocking 2016 election. These changing standards and biases can greatly skew what counts as democratic backsliding. Consider that in 2016, one main method used to measure democratic health gave the US an 8 out of 10. This score is lower, Meng and Little point out, than the score the US received during the Jim Crow era or prior to women’s suffrage. Meng and Little, keeping their metrics to three objective measurements—whether incumbents lose elections, if they face constitutional constraints like term limits, and numbers of journalists jailed and killed—found that there is little evidence of recent democratic backsliding in the aggregate.
The last few years have not been great, I admit that, but the idea that democracy is in decline is somewhat exaggerated it seems.
Emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change reached a new peak in 2022, according to early estimates. And climate disasters seem to be hitting at a breakneck pace. In 2022, the world experienced record heat waves in China and Europe, and devastating floods in Pakistan killed over 1,000 people and displaced millions. But a close look at energy and emissions data around the world shows that there are a few bright spots of good news, and a lot of potential progress ahead. For example, renewable sources make up a growing fraction of the energy supply, and they’re getting cheaper every year. Countries are setting new targets for emissions reductions, and unprecedented public investments could unlock more technological advances.
Things are getting better for the environment, but we need to pick up the pace, lets make that happen.
Renewable energy is poised to reach a milestone as a new government report projects that wind, solar and other renewable sources will exceed one-fourth of the country’s electricity generation for the first time, in 2024. This is one of the many takeaways from the federal government’s Short Term Energy Outlook, a monthly report whose new edition is the first to include a forecast for 2024. The report’s authors in the Energy Information Administration are expecting renewables to increase in market share, while natural gas and coal would both decrease. From 2023 to 2024, renewables would rise from 24 percent to 26 percent of U.S. electricity generation; coal’s share would drop from 18 percent to 17 percent; gas would remain the leader but drop from 38 percent to 37 percent; and nuclear would be unchanged at 19 percent.
Luckily we seem to be up to the task, from Vietnam to Thailand to Germany, we are making great strides in alternative energy.
n December 23, while many of us were doing last-minute holiday shopping, Congress passed a big $1.7 trillion spending package, keeping the government funded through September 30, which marks the end of this fiscal year. You’ve likely heard of some of the bill’s more newsworthy provisions, such as a change to the Electoral Count Act to prevent an attempt like Donald Trump’s in 2021 to overturn a presidential election result, or the $45 billion in support for Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion. But tucked into the package was a surprisingly large boost in funding for something that doesn’t usually generate headlines: global health programs. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, an international organization that provides financing for country-level programs like drug distribution and bednets in developing countries where those diseases are widespread, saw its funding from the US grow from $1.56 billion to $2 billion, a more than 28 percent year-over-year boost. Funding for USAID’s Global Health Programs, which include nutrition programs, efforts against infectious disease, and more, rose from $700 million to $900 million, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Global Public Health Protection division, which works abroad to strengthen health systems’ ability to respond to outbreaks, saw a $40 million boost as well.
Despite common misconceptions, congress can get important stuff with Bipartisan effort. Not always apparent but it can happen.
“Moving to low-carbon energy means digging millions of tonnes of minerals out of the earth”. I hear this argument used against renewable energy and electric vehicles a lot. It sounds like a lot, but is it really? Let’s take a look. We currently mine around 7 million tonnes of minerals for low-carbon technologies every year. 1 That includes all of the minerals for solar panels, wind energy, geothermal, concentrating solar power, hydropower, nuclear, electric vehicles, battery storage, and changes to electricity grids. I’ve included a complete list of the minerals included in the footnote. 2 But we need to deploy more low-carbon energy, fast. This will need to increase. How much will be mining once the low-carbon transition really picks up speed? The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that in 2040 we will need 28 million tonnes. This is in its ‘Sustainable Development Scenario’, which assumes a fast deployment of low-carbon energy. 3 That’s a lot of stuff to be digging out of the earth. Until we compare it to what we’re moving away from: fossil fuels. Every year we produce the equivalent of 15 billion tonnes of coal, oil, and gas. This comparison is shown in the chart.
So we dig up a lot more earth providing fossil fuels than we do for low carbon powers like solar and wind.
I mean that seems like it would be an obvious no brainer, but some people will come up with any dumb argument to keep rolling coal.
And on a final note, another in the series I like to call “Wow, the GOP really shot themselves in the foot on abortion rights didn’t they?”
And on that, Everyone have a good week, we will see you again next Monday.
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