(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Overnight News Digest for Weds Oct 11 (A light in the darkness edition) [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-11 Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and JeremyBloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw. OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time Things are looking pretty bad right now. An unrelenting stream of disaster and tragedy. So I thought for tonight’s OND I’d try to dig up a few positive stories… something to remind us that, as Samwise Gamgee said, “There’s still good in this word” ...“So here’s what good news I’ve got,” McKibben says. “At the same moment that the planet is starting to broil, the solar market is starting to cook.” He ran into solar entrepreneur Danny Kennedy at Climate Week in New York City, who told him, “The planet is now adding a gigawatt a day of solar power. A nuclear plant’s worth every day of solar power.” About half of that total is being added in China and far outdistancing the increase in its fossil fuel plants. The U.S. is second, followed by Brazil and India. McKibben finds this to be remarkable news and reason for optimism at a time when the future seems particularly bleak. “Think of the work that traditionally goes into building a new power plant — the years of work and planning and pouring concrete. We’re building the equivalent of one of those every day now, and instead of burning coal or gas they’re letting the sun handle the combustion.” The latest report from the International Energy Agency contains what McKibben considers to be a significant change in tone since its 2021 report. Back then, it was all about “should” while now the report is all about “will.” As the result of the continued rapid growth in renewable deployment, the IEA has moved from a theoretical exercise in 2021 to embracing the prospect of a net zero future with enthusiasm. x Prices of solar cells are down about 60% in 2023 to record lows last week. And prices are expected to set new record lows this month. Disinflation! This is one of the reasons solar is the lowest cost source of electricity in many parts of the world.https://t.co/3CQau6jDqF pic.twitter.com/Cgk8tj2XiV — John Raymond Hanger  (@johnrhanger) October 11, 2023 No roof, no solar power. That has been the dispiriting equation shutting out roughly half of all Americans from plugging into the sun. But signing up for solar soon might be as easy as subscribing to Netflix. Scores of new small solar farms that sell clean, local electricity directly to customers are popping up. The setup, dubbed “community solar,” is designed to bring solar power to people who don’t own their own homes or can’t install panels — often at prices below retail electricity rates. Clean electricity for less money seems a bit too good to be true. But it reflects a new reality: Solar energy prices are falling as private and public money, and new laws, are fueling a massive expansion of small-scale community solar projects. x Further evidence of the extraordinary response in Israel to Joe Biden's speech in the wake of the 10/7 attacks. From @alonpinkas: Biden gave Israelis the speech that Netanyahu could never deliver https://t.co/7ZReNg6mRu — David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) October 11, 2023 The Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the “social cost of carbon,” one of the most important calculations in U.S. climate policy, on Tuesday. The controversial metric attempts to quantify the hidden price of emitting carbon dioxide, from flood damage to health effects. The court’s surprise decision sets the stage for the Biden administration to broaden the metric’s use across federal agencies when formulating climate-related regulations. One of President Joe Biden’s very first executive orders in January 2021 directed agencies to recalculate the social cost of carbon — currently placed at $51 a ton while the government finalizes its revised estimate. In the meantime, Republican state attorneys general have been flinging lawsuits at the administration in an attempt to block its ability to use the metric in evaluating regulations. But their plans were thwarted by Tuesday’s order from the conservative-dominated Supreme Court. Without any explanation, the justices declined to hear Missouri v. Biden, a case in which 12 states alleged that Biden’s executive order violated the constitutional separation of powers. A federal appeals court ruled last year that the states suing over the use of the estimate didn’t have legal standing because they couldn’t show they’d been harmed by the way agencies had applied the metric. Financial institutions are refunding $140 million to consumers for so-called junk fees, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said Wednesday. The consumer watchdog said $98 million is being refunded for surprise overdraft fees, while another $22 million is being refunded for multiple insufficient fund fees levied on a single transaction. ...“The CFPB continues to uncover junk fee scams that violate the law and undermine consumer trust,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a press release. “We will continue to combat the illegal fees cropping up in consumer finance markets.” Electric school bus adoption continues to expand in the United States. As of June 2023, there are 2,277 electric school buses that are either on order, delivered or operating. In total, there are now 5,982 committed electric school buses, an increase of almost 400 buses since the release of WRI’s December 2022 dataset and over 3,200 more buses since June 2022. ...Electric school buses don’t have any tailpipe emissions, reducing students’ exposure to harmful pollutants, which studies have shown can have positive and significant effects on student test scores — in some cases, on par with increased teacher experience levels. Electric school buses produce less than half the greenhouse gas emissions of diesel or propane-powered school buses, even after accounting for emissions for electricity generation. Plus, unlike other fuels, the use of electric buses will continue to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector as more electricity generation comes from renewable energy. School bus electrification can also offer resiliency support to the electric grid by providing access to large batteries when not in use and add jobs in the growing electric vehicle industry, although this transition needs to be thoughtfully managed with equity considerations in mind. On the eve of my daughter’s bat mitzvah last week, I was thinking about her namesake, my grandmother, Helena. I think of my grandmother most pangingly when I see my daughter interacting sweetly with older people, how my tiny Bubby would have loved to know this gorgeous, thoughtful creature, with curls for days and a smile for everyone. My second thought in this chain always goes to how different Helena the elder’s life was from the life my daughter is inhabiting. My grandmother’s earthly experience was tough — she survived concentration camps and the loss of most of her family, made her way to a new country, and then another new, much colder country, found a job, raised my dad. My daughter’s life, though not without the challenges of modern adolescence and gratuitous slushie consumption, is mercifully free of such horrors and trials, as is mine. You can see what the third thought is going to be now – Could we have endured? My answer was once, most assuredly, no. It has changed. I contemplated that third thought anew after reading this misguided but compelling piece in The Guardian, about the ascetic Simone Weil (I have always preferred my Simones de Beauvoir, so I’ve been late to this second Simone). The author, Justine Toh, writes, “the climate crisis calls for a radical rethink of our cushy, carbon-heavy lives and our collective willingness to make sacrifices for future generations. But raised in a world of comfort and convenience, I get annoyed when there’s no wifi. I don’t do sacrifice. I need someone to show me how.” Toh’s argument is that we ought to look to Weil, the near-saintly French writer and philosopher, to understand how to endure hardship, as that is what the climate crisis will demand. I disagree with the premise. And I disagree with the assessment of humanity. It’s not about sacrifice in the way that Toh contends, and yes, we can do hard things. Let’s unpack these two things backwards, in high heels that we could totally live without. ...Kurt Vonnegut is famous for writing novels like Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle. In storytelling circles, he’s famous for his “shapes of stories.” These were eight diagrams that define the traditional arcs of common stories, like “Boy Meets Girl” or “From Bad to Worse.” His arc about fairy tales goes like this: Things start badly and then get a bit better. But then there’s a catastrophe that brings everything to ruin. The story ends with a drastic upheaval in fortunes — a transformation and magical finale — and everyone lives happily ever after. Tolkien, were he alive, would agree. For him, the single most important element of a fairy tale is this final dramatic reversal of misfortune. He coined the word “eucatastrophe” to describe it. “The consolation of fairy-stories [is] the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn,'” Tolkien wrote. The Lord of the Rings does not end with the hobbits dead and Sauron cackling over his orcish, industrial empire. It ends with light beating dark — with simple kindness, love, and companionship winning out over evil. Tolkien is very careful to make the point that this is not some form of escapism. It’s not quixotic wish fulfillment. It does not pretend the world is an endlessly happy idyll of singing dwarves and affable wizards. The world has great suffering and misery, and there are plenty of nightmares to be found. The eucatastrophe, though, is “the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat.” x A new report says NHL players are gearing up to use Pride Tape despite the league's ban, giving the middle finger to Gary Bettman and league officials.https://t.co/bCIrwH1YJV — Outsports (@outsports) October 11, 2023 x My next book is *The Lost Cause*. It's a climate emergency book. @LibraryJournal called it "a message hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak." As with all my books @Amazon refuses to sell the audiobook, so I'm selling it on @Kickstarter:https://t.co/NtQYBuOApX 1/ pic.twitter.com/HCybf6tsKd — Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr (@doctorow) October 2, 2023 My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful tale of the climate emergency, which comes out on November 14. Kim Stanley Robinson called it "an unforgettable vision of what could be": https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause I'm currently running a Kickstarter campaign to pre-sell the audiobook, which I produced and narrated myself (for complex and awful reasons, Amazon won't carry my audiobooks, see the Kickstarter campaign page for details). You can also pre-order the ebook and hardcovers, including signed and personalized copies: http://lost-cause.org For the next week or so, I'm going to be serializing the prologue of the book, which gets it off to quite a spicy start. Here's part one! Got any good news or positive stories? Share them with us in the comments! And sending out big hugs to everyone that needs/wants them tonight… because it’s been that kind of year. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/11/2198822/-Overnight-News-Digest-for-Weds-Oct-11-A-light-in-the-darkness-edition?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/