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From the GNR Newsroom, its the Monday Good News Roundup [1]
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Date: 2023-05-15
Dearest friends its that time once again for the Monday Good News Roundup, where your humble good news room gives you the good news to start the week off right. Its myself, Killer300 and Bhu delivering the good news, the only news that matters.
Before we start happy Mother’s day to all those who celebrate it. I sadly could not get together with my mom this year but I did call her to wish her the best and she seemed in high spirits so that’s good. I myself am currently beset by bug bites from an endless array of nasty varmits which have come with the warm weather, but its a small price to pay for Summer being right around the corner.
In any case, time now for good news.
North Dakota's Republican Gov. Doug Burgum has signed a bill into law to protect tribal cultures by codifying the federal Indian Child Welfare Act into state law, Burgum's office announced Monday. The federal Indian Child Welfare Act, enacted in 1978, gives preference to Native American families in foster care and adoption proceedings of Native children. Also known by the acronym ICWA, it was created in response to the alarming rate at which Native American and Alaska Native children were taken from their homes by public and private agencies. Several other states — including Montana, Wyoming and Utah — have considered codifying the act this year, as the U.S. Supreme Court considers a challenge to the federal law.
Good news for Native American families in North Dakota.
AUSTIN, Texas -- Facing new pressure over gun violence in Texas after two more mass shootings, Republicans on Monday unexpectedly allowed a bill that would raise the purchase age for semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21 to advance out of a House committee — even though the proposal has almost no chance of becoming law. The surprise move revealed faint momentum for gun control advocates after a weekend mass shooting at an outdoor mall near Dallas, but at the same time underscored how Texas Republicans are so resistant to gun restrictions that even clearing a small legislative hurdle caused supporters to celebrate.
Well it finally happened, the mass shooting epidemic has gotten so bad even the GOP is starting to falter in their resistance against gun control. Very promising to be certain.
2003, while doing audits for a French fashion brand at a Chinese factory, two French entrepreneurs, Sébastien Kopp and François-Ghislain Morillion, discovered thirty workers crammed into a 270-square-foot room with a single hole to drain the workers’ shower and also allow them to relieve themselves. “We realized that globalization had gone wrong,” Kopp says. They returned to Paris and decided to launch their own project, focused on “deconstructing the sneaker.” Sneakers had become popular in the late 1980s and ’90s as everyday wear, often with athletes sporting and touting the latest styles. But most of the money generated by big brands was going into marketing budgets, not the supply chain, according to Kopp. “We didn’t know much about shoes, but it was something everyone wore; we loved them as teenagers, and we knew that we could get all the pieces required for the shoe in one place: Brazil.”
They’re building a better sneaker, and protecting the environment in the process. Great news!
Eight years later, Ada Colau and the Comuns, as they are referred to locally, face a different political situation. They are no longer insurgent outsiders launching an improbable challenge to the region’s traditional parties. Rather, they are leaders who have spent eight years in office, amassing a record of accomplishment but also encountering the challenges of governance. Now, they are fighting for a third term — attempting not only to convince voters that their mission of creating a “fearless city” should continue, but also to cobble together alliances with other parties that will allow them to stay in command of Barcelona’s historic City Hall. After two terms, the radical experiment in Barcelona has found limits to the project of bringing social movement energy into the corridors of institutional power. And yet, it remains an intriguing model of electoral strategy. So what can we learn from the successes and shortcomings of Barcelona en Comú so far? And can the Comuns take their process of democratic revolt further?
Interesting developments in Barcelona to be certain.
As the busy summer travel season approaches, 25,000 union pilots at two of the nation’s largest commercial airlines — American and Southwest — are taxiing on the runway of a potential strike. Last week, the Allied Pilots Association (APA), which represents 15,000 pilots at American Airlines, announced that its members had voted overwhelmingly to authorize a work stoppage. Signaling their unity, thousands of uniformed APA members held informational pickets on May Day at ten of the nation’s major airports, including Chicago’s O’Hare and Boston’s Logan.
Here a strike there a strike, everyone gets a strike, and things get better for the working man.
Local climate action is right in the sweet spot where individual behavior and systemic change intersect — it’s where we as individuals can exercise some influence over systems that affect us directly. Seven years ago, my partner and I moved to a small town in northeastern Massachusetts called Hamilton. It’s famous for being a longtime home to General George S. Patton — and perhaps lesser known for having composted a 45-foot humpback whale (more on that in a minute!). I recently joined the Hamilton Wenham Climate Action Team, a small volunteer-run nonprofit aimed at decarbonizing the sister towns of Hamilton and Wenham, Massachusetts. I’d love to share with you some of the faces, the work and the accomplishments of the team to hopefully inspire you to consider joining or even starting your own local group. I guess I’m taking a page from the playbook of the How to Save a Planet podcast (RIP) and its goal of inspiring climate action.
Very inspiring, especially since I too live in a small town.
Recife’s first farmers’ market was held in 1997 as a demonstration of the produce that local farmers were growing. Pires said that using the agroecology techniques that the Centro Sabiá had been sharing for four years, not only were the farmers feeding themselves, they had extra produce to sell — and everything sold out. Now the city hosts 50 farmers’ markets each week, and nearly a hundred more serve smaller communities across the state. One weekend market in the well-off Casa Forte neighborhood sees farmers take a bus to the square where they set out their stalls, but the farmers themselves pay for this bus, Pires says. “Farmers perform a role and carry out a task by bringing food to the cities, but the state doesn’t recognize this as far as public policy goes,” Pires said. “Of course, the state can’t subsidize everything,” he acknowledged, “but it’s important to have some support.” Pires sees these markets as an educational opportunity for city dwellers, as well as providing a source of healthy food. Since the produce available varies by season, Pires says, shoppers are faced with the reality that growing in accordance with local conditions means things like mangoes only appear at certain times of the year. But there’s another surprising aspect to this story. A study the Centro Sabiá undertook with the Federal Institute of Pernambuco, a public, highly competitive high school focused on science and technology, compared 17 “traditionally” grown products in five large supermarket chains with the cost of those same products at the farmers’ markets.
All over the world things are changing for the better.
When you think of electric utilities, the words fast, nimble, tech-savvy or cuddly probably don’t come to mind. Nor do those qualities often apply to the startups dragging the old grid into a cleaner, less centralized future. But relative newcomer Octopus Energy quickly proved itself to have all those traits and more, and took over the U.K. electricity market in the process. Octopus Energy sells clean electricity to some 5.3 million customers globally, 5 million of them in the U.K. To supply that clean energy, the company has spent $6.3 billion to build its own renewable power plants. It supplements the electrons with a head-spinning array of clean energy products and services: smart electric-vehicle chargers, heat pumps, and payments for customers who shift their consumption around at key moments. Scores of cleantech startups have tackled these kinds of products and services individually over the years, in pursuit of the elusive ideal of an interactive, decentralized grid. Many of those startups have crumbled while waiting for mass consumer demand to materialize; others have been subsumed into energy incumbents. Octopus leapfrogged over that muddy slog by connecting the far-out grid innovations with a recognizable retail electricity business that quickly grew to reach millions of people.
Good for them, I hope they keep it up.
Many of you have asked about the Washington Post/ABC News poll which came out on Sunday, and so I’ve put together some notes about how we can start thinking about polling and electoral analysis this cycle here at Hopium. Let me know if you find all this helpful. Tom Bonier and I are working on a longer, more in-depth piece so today will be something more like some loose notes than a big comprehensive memo……
Lot of people already panicking over the polls it seems. Hopefully this makes you feel better.
But not as better as this! LIGHTNING ROUND! *SIRENS BLARE*
The case for some climate optimism
Fortified with coconuts, living coastlines are stopping coastal erosion.
World’s largest battery maker announces breakthrough in energy density
How the Netherlands plans on slashing emissions by 2030
The state of electric school bus adoption in the US
A ray of hope for some coral reefs
worlds largest carbon capture facility will store 9 million tons of carbon per year
US drug regulator approves first RSV Vaccine
US Governor expands access to contraceptives
US district court protects mail in voting in Kansas
Study shows small acts of kindness are frequent and universal
Unemployment rate hits milestone for Black Americans
that does it for this weeks lightning round, now back to our scheduled good news.
What comes after repealing parking mandates? Lots of newly legal homes. Studies from two cities observed that in the years following reform, 60 to 70 percent of new homes would previously have been illegal to build. The new data add to the heap of evidence that parking mandates—local rules that ban new homes and businesses unless they have a pre-determined number of off-street parking spaces—are a binding constraint on housing construction. While only a few buildings opted out of providing parking entirely, most new homes in the studies ultimately benefited from the increased flexibility. “It isn’t surprising,” said researcher C. J. Gabbe, who authored one of the studies. According to Gabbe, homebuilders have been saying for a long time that demand for off-street parking was lower than what zoning rules required.
Ha! Take that NIMBY’s.
In the last three weeks, Montana rocketed through a housing agenda that would give most US states a nosebleed. Duplexes: legal. Backyard cottages: legal. Discretionary design review: ended. Residential parking: optional after the first space. Commercial zones: they’re also apartment zones now. How’d it happen? A bipartisan coalition united around a simple idea: when in a housing shortage, let cities build like they used to. A series of housing supply bills, expected to be signed by Governor Greg Gianforte, would restore the ability to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs) and duplexes in cities across Montana as well as permit multifamily housing in commercial zones. Other bills shielded new housing from “not in my backyard” challenges and delays. All these bills gained wide bipartisan support in the Republican supermajority legislature.
Great news out of Montana!
A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that most Americans care far less about the so-called war on woke than Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has aimed to make his ongoing battle with the Walt Disney Co. over LGBTQ issues a centerpiece of his likely campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. The survey of 1,584 U.S. adults, which was conducted from May 5 to 8, finds that fewer consider “wokeness” (41%) a “big problem” in America today than any other option provided, including inflation (74%), breaching the debt ceiling (58%) and border security (58%).
Yeah notice how more people care about inflation than picking a fight with Disney. WHAT YOU GONNA DO ABOUT INFLATION RON? TELL US? RON? RON!
In last year’s midterms, when Democrats narrowly held on to control of the Senate and won crucial elections in battleground states, they did so in part by reversing one of Donald Trump’s biggest 2020 accomplishments: They won more voters from rural and exurban communities than anyone expected. From Arizona and Nevada, across the Midwest, and into North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Democratic Senate and gubernatorial candidates improved on President Joe Biden’s 2020 showing among this swath of the electorate, and persuaded tens of thousands of rural voters who voted for Trump to switch parties. Now, as the 2024 campaign map begins to take shape, Democratic candidates, the state and national parties, and their outside partners will have to make a choice about how seriously to invest in outreach and persuasion operations in these communities. Democrats have long struggled in rural communities, but their decline in support has only accelerated in recent years, cementing the idea for many that the party caters to highly educated and primarily urban voters. That narrative has only entrenched itself since the ’90s, when former President Bill Clinton essentially split rural voters with his Republican opponents in his two presidential campaigns and won over 1,100 rural counties in 1996. Since then, Democratic presidential candidates have endured dramatic losses in rural areas: in 2008, Barack Obama won 455 rural counties; in 2020, Joe Biden won only 194.
Don’t give up on rural areas folks. We’re out here too.
And on that note I think its time for this weeks GNR to draw to a close. We had a lot of good stories, and we’ll have more for you next week.
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