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From the GNR Newsroom, its the Monday Good News Roundup [1]

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Date: 2023-05-22

Welcome back to the Monday Good News roundup. Featuring y our GNR newsroom (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu) bringing you all the stories you want to hear in the morning to start your work week off right. So lets not waste any time and get right to it.

Utilities across the country use money collected from customers’ monthly bills to fund political campaigns and lobbying efforts, often with the goal of blocking climate progress. But in Colorado, that’s about to change. Last week, the state legislature passed the country’s most comprehensive bill to prevent utilities from using customer funds to support political activities.

Good news. If they want to buy politicians, they should do it on their own dime. Not on ours.

From late November through early March of this year, visitors to the University of Washington Career Center in Seattle would have found students sitting in a circle on the floor, some doing homework on laptops as they participated in one of the longest-running recent climate protests at the school. Their goal: to convince the UW administration to establish a policy banning fossil fuel companies from coming to campus to recruit students to work for them. “We’re trying to dismantle the fossil fuel industry’s presence at UW and their hold on the larger American public,” said Brett Anton of Institutional Climate Action, or ICA, the Washington state-based student group that organized the sit-in. For weeks, as many as 30 students at a time participated in the protest, which initially took place throughout the Career Center’s open hours before transitioning to a shorter window of time every afternoon. For some participants, balancing climate activism with school responsibilities presented real challenges

The kids are alright. And Fossil fuels are on their way out.

Thailand’s people have spoken — but Thailand’s people are not sovereign. It is always the Thai military and monarchy that reserves the right to decide who will rule, and how much, if any, power they will share with the people’s elected representatives. While the Southeast Asian kingdom has cycled unpredictably between electoral democracy and outright military rule for the past fifty years, what never changes is the supremacy of the military and monarchy in Thai political life. Could that finally be changing now? The biggest message from Monday’s parliamentary election is that a solid majority of Thai voters very much want it to change. Fueled by a surge in youth participation and following on the heels of massive urban protests against military rule in 2020, Thai voters delivered a thumping majority of seats in the House of Representatives to the two parties that openly challenged the political supremacy of the military and the monarchy. Pheu Thai, led by former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s 36-year-old daughter Paetongtarn, won an estimated 141 of 500 seats. Move Forward, the upstart progressive party fronted by 42-year-old businessman Pita Limjaroenrat, shocked the world by surpassing Pheu Thai and winning an estimated 151 seats. Youth is rarely served in any election, anywhere — this election was a gigantic exception.

Big things happening in Thailand.

Independent candidate Yemi Mobolade triumphed in Colorado Springs' mayor race against veteran Republican Wayne Williams during the May 16 runoff, winning a conservative stronghold that the GOP had held for 45 years. Mobolade, a small business owner and former economic development executive for the city, managed to defeat City Council member Williams, a well-known face of Colorado Republican politics, becoming the city's first elected Black mayor. Leon Young previously served as interim mayor for several months in 1997 but wasn't elected to the role. The race in Colorado Springs, an hour's drive south of Denver, is officially the first big mayoral race of the year for the state. Colorado Springs is one of three major Colorado cities electing a mayor this year, together with Denver, which held the race on April 4 but went on to a runoff scheduled for June 6, and Aurora, which will hold the race on November 7.

The GOP do not hold the future, we do, and we are gonna see more of their strongholds fall in the coming years. Gerrymandering and voter suppression wont work for them forever.

uesday night’s school board elections in Pennsylvania and Oregon again showed how classrooms continue to be a front in the Republican Party’s broader culture war, a battle it has pursued in states across the country with mixed results. In an Oregon school district in the predominantly rural Clackamas County, where students have protested a recent onslaught of book bans, several “parental rights” candidates lost their bids for the school board. However, GOP-backed school board candidates in southern Pennsylvania who backed book bans and policies targeting trans students survived primary challenges and will advance to the November elections. The races are part of Republicans’ national push to politicize once-sleepy school board races, using them as a vehicle to curb discussion of race and gender issues in the classroom and give parents more power over curriculums. Across the country, school board members backed by the GOP have banned seminal works of literature, from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but not without backlash.

The GOP want to mess with schools to make more ignorant drones who will keep voting for them in the future, but we’re not gonna let it happen.

he videos from Florida aren’t hard to find: Dozens of clips of empty fields, abandoned construction sites, and scores of truck drivers calling for boycotts of the state have racked up hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok and Twitter over the last month. The common thread? Fear and frustration over the state’s newest anti-immigrant law, signed a week ago by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, which mandates that businesses with 25 or more employees verify the citizenship status of workers through the federal online portal E-Verify or face stronger penalties, among other new restrictions. The new law, which goes into effect on July 1, is the latest move by DeSantis to capitalize on immigration politics as he prepares for a likely but as-yet-unannounced 2024 presidential campaign. The law, one of the most stringent state immigration measures in the US, seems intended to contrast President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration policy as the controversial pandemic-era health rule Title 42 expired last week. But the impact of the bill, critics say, will amount to a wide-ranging and intrusive crackdown on the state’s large immigrant communities, which stand to face the brunt of the new rules.

DeSantis continues to prove he’s incapable of doing anything but be stupidly pointlessly cruel. Maybe people should try and vote for a guy who can do more than bully trans kids.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) saw both of his endorsed candidates lose their races Tuesday, while the Florida governor is rumored to be readying for a possible presidential bid. DeSantis stepped into the Kentucky GOP’s gubernatorial primary to back former U.N. ambassador Kelly Craft, endorsing Craft on election day. As polling in the run-up to the election had projected, Craft lost the primary race to state Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who was backed by former President Trump.

And its not just DeSantis. Anyone attached to him also loses. Its kind of weird to say this, but DeSantis is no Donald Trump.

In typical fashion, the GOP’s reaction to Gen Z turning out to vote on them has been “How do we keep these people from voting?”

You can’t stop this GOP, the kids are coming for you, either now or in a few years, and they are gonna tear you down.

Our 2022 electoral take went something like this: in the spring a series of events - Dobbs/extremist state abortion restrictions, more mass shootings, the start of the Jan 6th Commission, extremist MAGA candidates prevailing in GOP primaries across the US - created an opportunity for Democrats to outperform expectations and make 2022 a close, competitive election and not a wave. We then saw Democrats outperform their 2020 results in 5 House special elections in AK, MN, NE and NY. We outperformed public polling in the Kansas abortion referendum by double digits. Voter registrations across the US became much more Democratic and much more female. We then saw this Dem overperformance, this intensity show up in the early vote, where we, incredibly, outperformed both 2018 and 2020 in states across the US.

We’re have been crushing it in special elections since Trump was first elected. Step by step we are taking the country back.

And now, for your consideration: A GNR Lightning round!

Starbucks Union workers have a new strategy to win first contract

The electric vehicles are coming!

Floating solar catches on in US

Deforestation in Brazil Amazon drops 68% under Lula

Wind is main source of energy in UK for first time

Ukraine planning green reconstruction even as war rages on

Thailand ramps up shifts towards renewables

A surprising improvement in health coverage

Lifesaving solution dramatically reduces severe bleeding after childbirth

American Heart Association certifies plant based meat product for first time

Ground breaking genetics library represents whole of humanity

A new cloned horse offers hope for endangered species

Glimmer of hope in African countries partially or fully abolishing death penalty

Wu shows its possible to reduce carbon emissions and increase economic growth

Minnesota plans for near ban on forever chemicals

New blood donation rules allow for more gay men to give blood

And that does it for the lightning round this week, back to our normal good news.

he Canadian city of Brossard, located right across the St. Lawrence River from Montréal, has installed a new traffic light in a school zone that only turns green for safe drivers. The light’s Québécois manufacturers call it the “feu de ralentissement éducatif” (educational traffic-calming light), or FRED. The light is red by default, but turns green when an attached speed camera detects an approaching motor vehicle that’s driving under the speed limit. “Across Canada, near school zones, people are asking for concrete measures to control speeding. This (technology) has not been accepted yet by the government, and we’re going to do it as a test,” Brossard’s mayor, Doreen Assaad, told StreetsblogMASS.

I have mentioned this, but I quite enjoy living in the future.

Concrete makers around the world are racing to reduce emissions from the ubiquitous but hard-to-decarbonize industry. This week, that global effort took an important step forward at a modest facility in central Alabama. On Wednesday, the startup CarbonBuilt said commercial production of its low-carbon concrete has begun at a plant in the city of Childersburg. Blair Block, a local masonry manufacturer, is making the thick gray blocks using CarbonBuilt’s novel technology, which the startup claims can reduce overall carbon dioxide emissions from concrete-making by 70 to 100 percent.

More good news for the Environment.

Last week, the White House released a comprehensive plan that could help fix America’s dysfunctional energy transmission system. The aim is to break down the barriers that are holding back the buildout of the truly massive amount of high-voltage power lines the country needs to connect clean energy projects to the grid and decarbonize the nation’s electricity supply. Now the question is how much of the plan can be passed through a politically fractured Congress — and if the answer is none, how much of the plan can be pushed through via executive actions by the Biden administration.

Oh that Biden, he’s always up to something isn’t he?

So, as we head into the weekend, let’s reflect on what I think has been a very good few weeks for the Democrats….

Democrats have been kicking ass and taking names, and both Trump and DeSantis are lagging behind. For the first time in a while, I actually feel rather optimistic going into the next election.

And on that note, lets conclude for this week. Have a good Monday, a good rest of your week, and I will see you post Memorial day.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/22/2170629/-From-the-GNR-Newsroom-its-the-Monday-Good-News-Roundup

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