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From the GNR Newsroom: Its the Monday Good News Roundup [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-09-25

Welcome back again my friends to the Monday Good News Roundup, that magical time of the week where your GNR Newsroom (myself, Killer300 and Bhu) bring out all the good news stories to start your week off right. We got a bumper crop this week so lets get right to it.

Canary Media’s chart of the week translates crucial data about the clean energy transition into a visual format. The solar industry is having yet another record-setting growth year, globally and in the U.S. A perfect storm of policy, incentives and still-plummeting costs has made solar the clear choice for new generation capacity worldwide. Research firm BloombergNEF expects global solar installations to rise by 56 percent in 2023, according to a September report.

Every day we are getting closer to the green future that will help save our species. Lets keep up this pace.

Freeway fights are often long, drawn-out affairs, that involve challenging poorly conceived and wasteful projects at a seemingly unending series of public meetings. In practice, freeway fighters generally lose every single battle—except the last one. The epitaph for one such freeway project, the half billion dollar widening of I-205 south of Portland, the so-called “Phase 2” project, looked like this:

If you read the Monday GNR enough, you notice certain themes crop up. One such themes is that we are not fans of the automotive industry, so this victor is definitely good news in our book.

Sacramento’s utility has installed its first batch of novel grid batteries to assist its quest for a carbon-free grid by 2030. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District cut a deal one year ago with cleantech company ESS to deliver a total of 200 megawatts/​2 gigawatt-hours of long-duration energy storage, kicking off what would be the company’s largest installation by far. Glossy announcements of novel energy storage technologies, like this one from SMUD and ESS, always deserve follow-up scrutiny; many times, the game-changing projects promised on paper never appear in the real world. But earlier this month, ESS delivered its first six iron flow batteries for Sacramento’s grid.

More good environmental news. More batteries and less carbon.

Illinois is poised to eliminate the use of cash bail in the state’s carceral system following the passage of the Pretrial Fairness Act by the state legislature on January 13. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, who has said he favors ending cash bail, is expected to sign the bill into law. The policy of conditional pretrial detention — holding accused people in jail until their trial, unless they can afford to pay bail — is currently practiced in all 50 states, although New Jersey did drastically reduce the use of cash bail. It’s a practice that necessarily penalizes poor people and disproportionately affects Black and Brown people, already overrepresented in U.S. jails and prisons.

It is often said that if the punishment for a crime is a fine, then its not illegal for rich people to do it. If that is true, then cash bail is kind of effed up. So glad to see its starting to be phased out in some places.

CHICAGO — We open with a prayer. Then an eclectic array of academics, pastors, activists, social workers and blue-collar churchgoers exchange season’s greetings, thank God for bringing us together, and ask them to look after a sick family member. Today’s reading is a tough one: Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster. Soon enough, discussion begins. There are knowing sighs at Marx condemning the conservative Christian idea that the world is a gift from God to interminably exploit. There’s also pushback: Should we readily agree with an avowed atheist who called religion a drug? Then there’s another prayer, this time for the then-upcoming Chicago mayoral election — everyone hopes God is on Brandon Johnson’s side — and a statement of hope about the environment. And that wraps this meeting of the ecology reading group of the Institute for Christian Socialism — a name the political Right would locate somewhere between oxymoron and heresy. The Institute for Christian Socialism (ICS), founded in the late 2010s by scholars and activists, is one of a growing number of left Christian organizations to emerge or be revived over the past decade, from radical Black churches to LGBTQ-affirming congregations. Stridently opposed to the right-wing approach to the Gospels, Christian leftists and socialists profess a radical faith centered on our duties to the least among us.

Like I said last week, not every Christian is a far right bigot, a lot of us are on the side of justice, and its time to remind people of that.

n the summer of 2023, faced with a couple of hundred people gathering in the town center on a weekly basis to spew far-right hate, the Left Youth began organizing weekly counter-protests. But the turnout usually only amounted to 30-40 people. That’s when Hänel’s husband, DJ Marmuto, got creative and “Rave Against the Right” was born. “A pop culture event is one with a very low inhibition threshold,” Preißler said. “We didn’t want to create a counter event, but rather an alternative.” They contacted the usual counter-protesters to organize a joint rave without any party flags. That way it would be clear they were open to receiving all types of people, which is exactly what ended up happening. Councilors from both the left-leaning Green Party as well as the conservative Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, showed up.

Resisting is a party, a celebration, as well as a fight. Party the fascists right out of town. Shout them down and shut them up.

Democrats Just Keep Winning - Last week I posted here about our ongoing success in elections across the US this year, and how it was similar to what we saw in the run up to our very strong general election performance last year. Well, last night we won 2 more specials in NH and PA. We won the NH State House seat by 12 points in a district Trump won in both 2016 and 2020 - another remarkable performance. So to recap:

I know some people who still think Biden is doing a bad job as President, I think it shows how strong the enemy’s misinformation campaign is, but all I see is he keeps winning and winning.

A protein long believed to be linked with Alzheimer’s has now been identified as a potential smoking gun for the most common cause of mortal childbirth complications after a drug was shown to have cure-like effects in mice. Pre-eclampsia is a pregnancy complication that affects up to 8% of pregnancies globally and is the leading cause of maternal and fetal mortality due to premature delivery, complications with the placenta, and lack of oxygen. It was during the course of looking for a treatment for pre-eclampsia that Brown University’s Surendra Sharma and Sukanta Jash discovered that a key marker for the disease was also present in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.

I think that’s what we call making lemons out of lemonade.

A team of Scandinavian researchers has recovered messenger and micro RNA from a Tasmanian tiger specimen kept in a museum collection. It’s the first-ever collection of RNA from an extinct creature in history, an achievement long sought after in the study of extinct species and for other applications. The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, was truly unique for an apex predator. This large predatory marsupial was king among Tasmanian forests which remain largely intact since its extinction 130 years ago. For this reason, the potential resurrection of the thylacine has received a lot of attention, as it would immediately solve many problems facing the balance of the Tasmanian ecosystem without the complexities of trying to replace the apex predator role with a non-native animal.

And in this week in “I love living in the future” We might be able to bring back the Tasmanian Tiger!

Hey you hear that? It sounds like its time for another GNR Lightning round!

Gen Z is the generation of optimists

Germany to pass 50% renewables this year

China's solar capacity to hit 1,000 GW by 2026

Florida adding more solar panels than any state

Doc Martins now offering repairs

The holy grail to replace palm oil

Proper treatment for hypertension could save millions

Anything Ozempic can’t do?

Federal reserve predicts soft landing

EU hikes renewable energy targets

Wow, quite a lot of good news this lightning round, now back to our regularly scheduled program.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida Gov. is losing his clout in Florida. College boards, stacked with DeSantis appointees, are rejecting job candidates with ties to the governor. The chair of the Republican Party of Florida urged executive committee members to attend all GOP candidate events — giving cover to party faithful who want to attend a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with former President . And the board that oversees many of Florida’s affordable housing programs this month placed on leave its executive director, who was helped into the job by a top DeSantis adviser.

I think we can call time on DeSantis’ political career. Here’s hoping he shuffles off to obscurity and never bothers anyone else for the rest of his sad pathetic life.

Add Phoenix, Arizona, to the list of cities embracing accessory dwelling units as a tool to tackle the housing crisis. Phoenix City Council voted earlier this month to approve new zoning rules to allow construction of what Arizonans call “casitas.” The need is urgent. With a population of 1.64 million, Phoenix is currently the fifth-largest city in the U.S., and one of the fastest growing. This zoning reform is intended to spur development of incremental housing, and allow homeowners to reap more economic benefit from their properties. The new regulations allow for structures up to 1,000 square feet and 15 feet tall. To discourage efforts to turn casitas into vacation rentals, leases are required to be at least 31 days in length. New zoning definitions have also been added to distinguish casitas from other multi-family forms of housing such as duplexes (“a building on one lot, which houses exactly two dwelling units, neither of which may be considered an accessory dwelling unit”), and triplexes.

Another trend you may notice with the Monday GNR: We like stories about affordable housing. And this is very good news in that regard.

Anyway, that’s all for this week, We at the GNR Newsroom with everyone a good week.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/25/2195287/-From-the-GNR-Newsroom-Its-the-Monday-Good-News-Roundup

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