Its time once again for the Monday Good News Roundup.
This week is special for me because its the last week before my personal vacation, and will probably be the last week I work at my current place of employment before my transfer to another store (due to my moving).
fourteen years I’ve been at this place. Part of me will miss it, but another part of me is ready for a change (even if said change is moving to another store).
But enough about all that, lets get into our carefully collected and curated list of good news, compliments of my dear associates Killer300 and Bhu.
The high-growth, multibillion-dollar U.S. solar industry is getting a two-year reprieve from an import tariff threat that has left it in limbo, courtesy of an executive decision from President Biden, according to news reports.
The threat to the industry started when Auxin Solar, a tiny California-based maker of solar panels, convinced the U.S. Department of Commerce to investigate whether new tariffs should be imposed on panel manufacturers in Southeast Asia for allegedly circumventing existing tariffs on Chinese solar companies. The threat of potential new tariffs, which could have been made retroactive, stopped the industry in its tracks and led to many projects being put on hold over the last few months.
Biden once again knocking it out of the park in regards to helping the environment. That’s why we voted for him.
Every May Day, labor unions around the world celebrate the heroism of the militant workers of 1886 who led a bloody general strike demanding the eight-hour workday. But there is also another, usually less inspiring, spring ritual of the labor movement: the parsing of union membership data and trends in the annual release by the Department of Labor. After the data release in March, almost always showing a decline in membership, the media and pundits warn that labor is facing an “existential crisis,” predicting unions will soon be irrelevant or bankrupt unless they urgently organize more workers.
This ritual has been observed at least since the early 1990s, when I first started working for the labor movement. It also happens to be, in some significant ways, wrong.
Despite the best wishes of corporations, Unions are not going anywhere, in fact they are becoming stronger than ever.
In the end, it was a confidence vote result that didn’t inspire confidence. The 148 of Boris Johnson’s own MPs who wanted to boot him out of No.10 made up 41 per cent of his Parliamentary party.
Even in denouncing the rebels, one senior ally of the PM didn’t sound exactly convincing. “We’ve heard the [boy] shepherd crying wolf many times,” they said. “In the end the wolf did come on this occasion. Hopefully we've seen off the wolf.”
One MP had a slightly different analogy. “It’s like a lion chasing a zebra,” they said. “The zebra may escape but with a gammy leg that will get infected. And he’ll be down in the end.”
I’d say that Boris Johnson probably had the worst week of anyone last week, but then I remember we started the Jan 6 hearings last week. So I know at least one guy having a worse week ;)
It's true, activism can look big, like organizing a march for racial justice or occupying a pump station to protest a pipeline. But after reflecting on interviews and research for The Lightmaker's Manifesto: How to Work for Change Without Losing Your Joy, Walrond realized it was time to expand her definition of activism.
This was covered last week, but it bears repeating. It can be easy to get burned out fighting for a better future, so its always good to try and take some joy in your work.
Why? We are in a very different place than even 5 to 10 years ago, when the 2015 Climate Accords were signed in Paris that committed the world to under 2 degrees Celsius of warming, and preferably 1.5 degrees. We have already averted the worst-case scenarios that were so alarming around that time. Before 2015, we anticipated four degrees of warming by the end of the century, which, as Klein says, would have been “cataclysmic.” Now we’re on track for just under three, and new climate commitments, if met, would bring us to two.
That is a big “if,” of course. But there have been substantial shifts in governmental and corporate appetites to tackle the issue as public attention around climate change grows and steadies, bolstered by energetic activism around the world. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured into clean energy projects and technology, like scaling up carbon capture, that are part of the roadmap to hitting net-zero by 2050.
So we haven’t met all our goals regarding climate change, but we are doing better than we were. Any progress is good progress and we need to keep it up.
ales of non-plug-in internal combustion-powered vehicles peaked in 2017, according to a report by industry analysts at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, and have been in "permanent decline" since then as sales of plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles increase.
Sales of plug-in vehicles are also expected to triple their current levels by 2025, according to the report.
"Most importantly, the market is shifting from being driven primarily by policy, to one where organic consumer demand is the most important factor," lead authors Colin McKerracher and Aleksandra O'Donovan wrote in the BloombergNEF report.
In 2025, the global auto industry will sell 20.6 million plug-in vehicles, according the report, compared to 6.6 million this year. Sales of purely internal combustion-powered vehicles, while projected to still make up the majority of total car sales in 2025, will have decreased.
This will go a long way to helping the environment. The age of fossil fuels is coming to a close, and we’re seeing it happen.
Threats to our democracy are two-fold: a growth of support for authoritarianism by some and the withdrawal from and lack of engagement in political activity by others. Both trends stem from people’s loss of trust in their government and belief that officials don’t represent and serve them. Neither escalating partisan conflict nor escapism are solutions. However one fresh tactic is increasingly being used to establish broad dialogue, actively engage citizens in policy decisions and thereby revitalize democracy.
Citizens’ assemblies have a long history, from ancient Athens and Rome to Rousseau’s Geneva and Vermont’s annual town halls. Rather than bringing all residents of a particular jurisdiction together, recently leaders have turned to selecting representative demographic samples of the population using the technique of “sortition.” People identified in the sample are invited to join the assembly, which functions like a jury. The participants gather either in person or virtually, are paid, receive information from experts and then deliberate together to make policy recommendations to government officials. The success of these exercises in participatory democracy depends on initial support from officials, accurate sortition, reliable and balanced expert information, transparency, extensive communication with the public and, finally, adoption and implementation of the recommendations by the officials.
All over the world people are organizing to rescue democracy.
A Texas judge on Friday temporarily blocked the state from investigating families of transgender children who have received gender-confirming medical care, a new obstacle to the state labeling such treatments as child abuse.
The temporary restraining order issued by Judge Jan Soifer halts investigations against three families who sued, and prevents any similar investigations against members of the LGBTQ advocacy group PFLAG Inc. The group has more than 600 members in Texas.
Once again the evil attempts to erase and harass trans people, especially kids, is thwarted by people who have at least a modicum of human decency in them.
Congressional hearings are rarely designed to be watched. That’s why they’re typically aired on C-Span in off-prime hours. They’re usually shaped by the convenience and ambitions of the participants, rather than the interests of a potential audience.
The opening session of the January 6 investigative committee last night was different, and was tremendously effective. It reflected sharp awareness of how politicians typically get in their own way—with time-hogging introductions, with speeches masquerading as “questions,” with attempts to create dramatic moments that might make it onto a cable TV show or the internet.
To avoid those pitfalls, this committee’s leaders, members, and staff did everything within their power to convey the result of their investigation: That there had been a plot to overturn the results of an election, and that the plot was led from within the White House by the incumbent president himself.
I can’t think of a better thing to leave off on. One day that evil pathetic old man will be nothing but a bad memory, and we will continue on.
But I hope that we provided you some good memories going forward with the GNR this week. Stay safe, stay healthy, and have a good week.