Welcome back friends to the Monday GNR roundup. You know the drill by now: Each Monday the GNR newsroom (myself, Killer300 and Bhu) get the stories to start your week off right. So lets get right to it and jump into the good news.
Consumers can look forward to faster, safer and more reliable internet connections under the promises of newly reinstated government regulations.
The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 on Thursday to reclassify broadband as a public utility, such as water and electricity — to regulate access to the internet. The move to expand government oversight of internet service providers comes after the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the magnitude of the digital divide, forcing consumers to rely on high-speed internet for school and work, as well as social and health support.
Extremely good news. A healthy and strong internet is the cornerstone to a healthy democracy. Which is probably why the GOP want to ruin it (but to be fair they want to ruin everything). Lets make sure we keep it by making sure Biden wins in November.
“Urban buildings are where most of our carbon emissions come from in the built environment,” Lai told Canary Media. She said the company is aiming to “expand the addressable, serviceable market” for geothermal heating and cooling so that even buildings in dense areas can harvest energy hiding below the surface.
In mid-April, the clean-energy system officially went online in a 30,000-square-foot building on the Penn Field campus, a former World War I military airfield that today hosts local businesses like Deep Eddy Vodka and High Brew Coffee.
“We now have user prototypes to show that geothermal can be more space-efficient, can be low risk, and can be overall faster to install,” Lai said of the Austin installation. “And that’s what we think it will take to scale” the technology overall.
Geothermal pumps are so cool, I wish I had one in my apartment.
In order to make good on its ambitious offshore wind plans, Virginia electric utility Dominion Energy first had to get into the shipbuilding business.
The regulated monopoly is building Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, a $10 billion, 2.6 gigawatt wind project 23.5 miles offshore of Virginia Beach. The project is tied with New England Wind for the title of largest of its kind approved by the federal government, and represents a pivotal step toward the Biden administration’s goal of installing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. But to shuttle the necessary foundations, nacelles, and turbine blades from the port of Hampton Roads, Virginia, to the project, Dominion must obey a protectionist law from more than a century ago.
The Jones Act, formally known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, mandates that ships carrying goods between American ports must be made in the U.S., flagged in the U.S., owned by Americans, and staffed by an American workforce.
To satisfy that mandate, Dominion commissioned the first-ever Jones Act–compliant vessel for offshore wind installation, which hit the water in Brownsville, Texas, last week. The hull welding on the 472-foot vessel is complete, as are its four enormous legs, which will hoist it out of the water during turbine installation. This $625 million leviathan, named Charybdis after the fearsome sea-monster foe of Odysseus, still needs some finishing touches before it sets sail to Virginia, which is expected to happen later this year.
Can I just say I love they named it Charybdis? My favorite Greek sea monster.
Recent stories in Business Insider and the Wall Street Journal suggest trouble in Austin’s housing market. Austin’s rents are down a staggering 7% from last year. The latter took a particularly bleak tone in describing the city’s trajectory, claiming that it is “running in reverse.” The examples it cites to back up this foreboding assertion–including landlords offering deals to current tenants and, drawn by low rents, new people moving to Austin–seems to contradict its thesis. Rather than “running in reverse,” people are running toward Austin precisely because the increased housing supply makes it more attractive.
According to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, 42 million (or 32% of) American households are cost-burdened, including a record 22.4 million renters. Austin’s share of cost-burdened households is 36%, a 6% decline from 2010. At the same time, the city grew its population by 19%, and from 2017-2022, it grew its metro area GDP by 57%.
This is what economically sustainable growth looks like. When a city adds homes alongside jobs like Austin has, it thrives. But when a city doesn’t add homes while it adds jobs, residents get squeezed by high housing costs and start wondering if leaving for somewhere with more housing options and fewer jobs would be better for their pocketbooks.
Good news out of Austin.
Building local coalitions. Kentucky’s a wonderful example, because there was this really deep coalition that fought to get the governor to veto. It was this coalition of radical abolitionist groups and bail funds, pretty mainstream moderate groups and even some conservative groups — and the unifier was: “We don’t think we should be increasing incarceration and criminalization.”
People are very much talking with each other about how not to exceptionalize the moment. I think increasingly people are finding that it’s not about bail funds: It’s about the state wanting to criminalize community care, to remove any avenues towards freedom. There are attacks on abortion funds, attacks on Food Not Bombs; there’s many forms of solidarity that are being attacked. Sure, there’s gonna be unique things about bail, but the lesson is people situating and fighting back against the attacks on solidarity — and really naming that.
The far right never runs out of dirty tricks to turn loose on us, but we always rise up and fight back.
Sound Transit cut the ribbon on its brand new East Link light rail line at 11:30am Saturday and crush loads of passengers poured into the system to get their first ride. Sound Transit’s second line, dubbed the 2 Line, arrived later than anticipated and in an abbreviated form without the tracks yet open across Lake Washington to Mercer Island and Seattle — where it will eventually share track with the 1 Line as far north as Lynnwood — due to construction issues.
Nonetheless, the eight-station starter line that opened this weekend was warmly greeted and heralded as transformative by leading officials from across the region.
Trains. We love them, we want them as an alternative to cars, people need to give them to us.
Until recently, a strip of land near a transit station in San Francisco was an underused parking lot. Now it’s home to more than 100 affordable apartments.
There’s no longer any parking for cars on the site. But there’s an indoor storage room for bikes, and residents can walk across a plaza to get on a train or board a bus. For low-income San Franciscans who might otherwise be forced to move out of the city because of the cost of housing—and spend as much as three hours commuting to work as a teacher, nurse, or barista—living without a car can be more convenient, less expensive, and make it easier to shrink their carbon footprint
Great news out of San Fran.
One of the largest solar projects in the country is moving closer to completion, and it’s not in a famously sunny state like California, Texas, or even Florida. It’s in Minnesota, on former potato farms near the site of a retiring coal plant.
The Sherco solar and energy-storage facility will be the largest solar project in the Upper Midwest, and the fifth-largest in the U.S. by the time it’s fully completed in 2026. The first phase of the project should begin sending emissions-free electricity to the grid this fall, heralding the start of a new era in a state whose largest solar project until now has been just 100 megawatts. This new project will have a capacity of 710 megawatts. It’s being built by utility Xcel Energy, which will also operate the facility once it’s online.
Out with the old, in with the new.
he Environmental Protection Agency is banning most uses of a toxic chemical often used to refinish furniture and bathtubs that has been linked to dozens of deaths since 1980.
The agency announced a rule Tuesday that will limit all consumer uses of methylene chloride, as well as most industrial and commercial uses. Exempted uses include those "highly industrialized and important to national security and the economy," such as climate-friendly coolants and parts for electric vehicles, according to the EPA.
The EPA is restricting use of methylene chloride roughly six years after a CBS News investigation prompted three major retailers — Home Depot, Lowe's and Sherwin-Williams — to agree to pull products with the chemical off their shelves by the end of 2018.
Methylene chloride is known to cause a range of cancers, as well as neurotoxicity and liver damage, while direct exposure can lead to death, according to the EPA. At least 88 people have died from acute exposure to methylene chloride since 1980, most of them who were refinishing bathtubs or stripping paint, the agency said. The fatalities included trained workers who were equipped with personal protection equipment.
As they say, safety laws are written in blood.
Donald Trump's attorneys' attempts to keep their defendant awake in court fell short, as he reportedly once again dozed off at the outset of his third week on trial.
The former President can’t stop sleeping in court, per reporters at the trial. Lisa Rubin, a legal correspondent for MSNBC, told Chris Jansing that Trump’s lawyers have gone to great lengths trying to keep him from snoozing during arguments.
Rubin told Jansing that attorneys have deployed “a number of different devices” to keep Trump alert, making efforts to distract or babysit him.
“When there are sidebars, an attorney doesn’t leave his side anymore because leaving him alone means leaving him to potentially sleep,” Rubin said. “He has a stack of papers with him at all times now to go through.”
Yeah, I never want to hear another “Sleepy Joe” crack ever again after this.
Across diverse landscapes all over the world, a growing number of experiments in “rewilding” are demonstrating what can be achieved through an approach to conservation that seeks to minimize human intervention and instead allow nature itself to take the lead.
The term ‘rewilding’ has become something of a buzzword over the last few years, but many of the practices associated with the term have been around in various forms for decades – long enough for us to begin to see the effects of these kinds of initiatives and the remarkable successes they have often achieved.
The following are six among many such successes.
We’ve done some stuff to animals, its nice to see that we’re fixing some of it.
Dear Friends,
Sending along the recording of the talk I gave last night to Hopium paid subscribers. You can find it above. I opened up with a 20 minute overview of the national political landscape and then answered questions for another 40 minutes or so. It was a good group and I think you will find the things we discussed useful in your work.
I think we are gonna win big in November, and banish the shadow of Trumpism once and for all. So lets all work real hard to make that happen.
Last week, we posted a tongue-in-cheek video on social media about an article from The Economist headlined “Gen Z is unprecedentedly rich,” which posited that Gen Z is financially better off, at the age they are now, than previous generations were at the same age.
It went viral, with nearly 700,000 views on Instagram. The comment section was by and large one of marked disbelief. Gen Z, the generation sucker-punched by explosive rents, inflation, and student loans—rich?
Not rich, exactly—they haven’t yet had time to build substantial wealth—but comparatively rich, yes. The piece from The Economist has a global, not American, focus. It does, however, mention a paper by authors from the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute and the Federal Reserve that measured median household income in the United States. Taking into account taxes, government transfers, and inflation, it found that “The typical 25-year-old Gen Z-er has an annual household income of over $40,000, more than 50 percent above baby-boomers at the same age.”
Gen Z is likely the most well-educated generation in American history. Post-pandemic, they have also been blessed by a low unemployment rate, as well as rapid growth in wages that has not been outpaced by inflation.
The growth has been so strong that it has even balanced out expensive rents. A study from RentCafe, based on data from 200 metro areas, found that zoomers in their twenties pay more for rent than millennials did at that age. But they also earn more, so rent as a proportion of income has actually stayed the same—26.5 percent—between the generations. And Gen Z is paying less, as a proportion of their income, to own a house.
The money that was taken from our generation is getting taken back so the future generations can use it instead of sitting in some rich jerks bank account. Good news.
As a sector plagued by underpayment, sham contracting, and hypercasualization, the fitness industry there has no shortage of issues to mobilize around. It’s common — as fitness instructors explain in United Workers Union (UWU) meetings and forums — for employers to expect them to shoulder costs associated with travel, time spent learning choreography, and gaining “optional” training and certificates.
According to some group fitness instructors (GFIs), these financial overheads are so onerous that the expenses for delivering a class can, at times, outweigh remuneration entirely. “The only reason this is the case,” one fitness worker and UWU member explained, “is because people have perpetuated it for so many years. But there’s is no reason or excuse for unpaid work.”
Sounds like fitness instructors are in a bad place right now, lets hope they get what they are after.
A Denver judge has ruled against a coalition of conservative groups that tried to unwind a multi-billion-dollar funding law for Colorado’s transportation system.
The law in question cleared the Colorado legislature with almost entirely Democratic votes in 2021. Bill sponsors relied heavily on fees in the measure to sidestep the state Taxpayer’s’ Bill of Rights, which requires that voters approve any new tax increase.
However, the conservative groups that brought the lawsuit alleged the new fees were still illegal because they violated Proposition 117. Voters in 2020 passed that law, which sets limits on the amount of new fee revenue that can be collected without voter approval.
Conservatives always seem be trying to make things worse, luckily the judges are keeping them in check.
Anyway that does it for this week, tune in next week for more good news.