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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: 2024-06-24  

Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, where your intrepid GNR Newsroom (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu) are hard at work finding you the good news stories to start your week off right.

Its my Birthday this week! Thursday, I can’t take the whole week off because I had to use all my vacation time during my injury, but I’m still looking forward to it.

That’s all the personal stuff from me, lets get onto the news.

The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against software maker Adobe and two of its executives, Maninder Sawhney and David Wadhwani, for deceiving consumers by hiding the early termination fee for its most popular subscription plan and making it difficult for consumers to cancel their subscriptions. A federal court complaint filed by the Department of Justice upon notification and referral from the FTC charges that Adobe pushed consumers toward the “annual paid monthly” subscription without adequately disclosing that cancelling the plan in the first year could cost hundreds of dollars. Wadhwani is the president of Adobe’s digital media business, and Sawhney is an Adobe vice president.

Once again Biden’s FTC is taking it to big corporations who keep using shitty business practices to make using their products a miserable experience. Good on them.

Octopus Energy has surged to the top of the U.K. electricity market with its plucky brand of clean, flexible, customer-centric energy. Now it’s loading up on new investment to make a broader push into North America. The sprawling clean energy startup pulled in two new investments in recent weeks. On May 7, it announced a re-up from existing investors, including Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management and the Canada Pension Plan. Last week, it added a new round from the $1 billion Innovation and Expansion Fund at Tom Steyer’s Galvanize Climate Solutions. The parties did not disclose the size of the new infusions but said that they lift Octopus’ private valuation to $9 billion. Previously, Octopus raised an $800 million round in December, putting its valuation at $7.8 billion.

Honestly I’m just here for the name. I mean who doesn’t like octopi?

A reservoir is many things: a source of drinking water, a playground for swimmers, a refuge for migrating birds. But if you ask solar-power enthusiasts, a reservoir is also not realizing its full potential. That open water could be covered with buoyant panels, a burgeoning technology known as floating photovoltaics, aka ​“floatovoltaics.” They could simultaneously gather energy from the sun and shade the water, reducing evaporation — an especially welcome bonus where droughts are getting worse. Now, scientists have crunched the numbers and found that if humans deployed floatovoltaics in a fraction of lakes and reservoirs around the world — covering just 10 percent of the surface area of each — the systems could collectively generate four times the amount of power the United Kingdom uses in a year. The effectiveness of so-called FPVs would vary from country to country, but their research found that some could theoretically supply all their electricity this way, including Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Papua New Guinea.

And in this weeks “Science is freaking cool” story, floating lake solar panels (please don’t ask me to spell the word for it.)

India's first bullet train, connecting Mumbai and Ahmedabad, promises to revolutionize the nation's transportation infrastructure and boost economic growth. With a projected completion date in 2028, the Mumbai-Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail project is expected to significantly impact various sectors of the economy, from construction to tourism. Estimated to use 16 million tons of steel and 1.7 million cubic meters of cement, the project has already injected a significant boost into India's construction industry, and officials hope the finished project will provide longer-term benefits as well.

Great news of progress in India.

President Joe Biden is taking executive action to protect undocumented spouses of American citizens — a move that would shield about 500,000 immigrants from deportation. The White House announced the election-year policy Tuesday, framing it as “new action to keep families together.” NBC News reported last week that action protecting the spouses was likely to be announced soon, after urging from immigration advocates and Democratic lawmakers and as the president courts Latino voters in crucial battleground states.

Another great thing done by Biden. Don’t let anyone tell you he’s a bad president.

According to the Chicago Department of Transportation, in 2023 the City installed over 50 miles of bikeways, more than any previous year, as foreshadowed by the agency's Chicago Cycling Strategy plan that spring. That number included 27 miles of new protected bike lanes and existing PBLs upgraded with concrete; as well as 18 miles of new Neighborhood Greenway side street bike routes. I completed my exploration of all these new bikeways during Streetsblog Chicago's Bike Lane Week last December. Happily, it looks like I'll have a lot of test-riding of new bikeways to do this year as well. Earlier this week, CDOT released its 2024 Planned Bikeways Installations Tracker, showing that so far this year, dozens of new bikeway projects are "planned", "underway", or – best of all – "installed". You can view the interactive spreadsheet here, or just peruse the screenshots below.

Good news if you live in Chicago and you want to bike around time.

ccording to a YouGov survey, national awareness of Juneteenth is rising, with 90 percent of Americans now aware of the holiday, versus 74 percent in 2022. Of those, a little over two-thirds know why the holiday is celebrated. Next generations may be better educated about black history, however. Plenty of air was given to last year’s spat between Ron DeSantis and the College Board, when the Florida governor objected to certain units within a new Advanced Placement (AP) course on African American history curriculum and canceled its pilot program in the state. While the course’s future in Florida is still unclear, the fracas overshadowed the fact that elsewhere, the pilot was more popular than expected. The AP course will launch nationwide in the fall of 2024, with an estimated 16,000 students enrolled. Despite plantation owners’ reluctance to heed the Emancipation Proclamation, Juneteenth was first celebrated by black Texans in 1866 and in the ensuing years with religious sermons, “slave food delicacies” like barbecue, and games, wrote the historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in The Root. As a national tradition, however, it was losing ground to New Year’s Day as the first choice of celebrating black freedom until the civil rights movement.

Despite the GOP’s best efforts people are becoming more educated about the past, which is good for our future.

Buildings everywhere need to get off fossil fuels in order to help the world avoid climate catastrophe. Yet owners of large commercial buildings in New York City are especially feeling the pressure: The groundbreaking Local Law 97 takes effect this year, requiring buildings of more than 25,000 square feet to meet specific emissions limits, which become more stringent in 2030, or face hefty fines. One cutting-edge retrofit project is underway at the corner of Hudson and Charlton streets in lower Manhattan. The 17-story Art Deco office building, built in 1931, is ditching its fossil-gas boiler for uber-efficient electric heat pumps that are both heaters and air conditioners. They’re key components of a system that aims to heat and cool the building more efficiently by capturing thermal energy that would otherwise be wasted.

This is my first time hearing about Heat Waste, sounds very neat.

Smart Wires has spent more than a decade putting its grid-boosting technology to the test in Australia, South America, and Europe. Now, the Durham, North Carolina–based company is finally getting a crack at projects in the U.S., backed by federal funds and policies supporting technologies that could unlock gigawatts of capacity on the country’s existing power grids. In October, Smart Wires was selected for two projects that will receive a combined $60 million in U.S. Department of Energy funding. They will be the first large-scale U.S. deployments of Smart Wires’ SmartValve power flow control devices, which can digitally increase resistance on individual power lines in a transmission network to redirect power onto underutilized lines.

Its about time, our power grids need a serious overhaul.

This all should be reassuring news for any creative people worried that they could lose their job to a computer program. And the DeepMind study is a great example of how AI can actually be helpful for creatives. It can take on some of the boring, mundane, formulaic aspects of the creative process, but it can’t replace the magic and originality that humans bring. AI models are limited to their training data and will forever only reflect the zeitgeist at the moment of their training. That gets old pretty quickly.

AI will never replace human artists, the sooner everyone realizes this the better.

Biden says supreme court preserved 'critical protections' for domestic violence survivors Joe Biden said the supreme court’s ruling today upholding a federal law that bans domestic abusers from possessing guns preserves “critical protections” for victims of abuse. “No one who has been abused should have to worry about their abuser getting a gun. As a result of today’s ruling, survivors of domestic violence and their families will still be able to count on critical protections, just as they have for the past three decades,” the president said.

Even the Supreme Court gets it right sometimes.

By the end of this decade, global demand for oil will peak — and that’s largely thanks to the rise of electric vehicles and clean energy technologies, according to the International Energy Agency’s ​“Oil 2024” report.

Oil is on its way out, lets make it irrelevant even faster.

As a flock of about 2,000 sheep graze between rows of solar panels, grazier Tony Inder wonders what all the fuss is about. “I’m not going to suggest it’s everyone’s cup of tea,” he says. “But as far as sheep grazing goes, solar is really good.” Inder is talking about concerns over the encroachment of prime agricultural land by ever-expanding solar and windfarms, a well-trodden talking point for the loudest opponents to Australia’s energy transition. But on Inder’s New South Wales property, a solar farm has increased wool production. It is a symbiotic relationship that the director of the National Renewables in Agriculture Conference, Karin Stark, wants to see replicated across as many solar farms as possible as Australia’s energy grid transitions away from fossil fuels. “It’s all about farm diversification,” Stark says. “At the moment a lot of us farmers are reliant on when it’s going to rain, having solar and wind provides this secondary income.”

Don’t believe anyone saying Solar panels are destroying farming land. You can use it for both.

Safer and quieter wind power solutions may soon be coming to the roof of an office or apartment building near you. Now that startup Aeromine Technologies has received funding, it can move forward with the commercial rollout of its "motionless" wind energy system this year, as reported by Electrek. When you think of wind turbines, it's usually the tall, large-bladed ones that are scattered throughout onshore and offshore farms to capture this green resource. As the Energy Information Administration reported, these turbines were already responsible for over 10% of all utility electrical grid energy in the U.S. in 2023. However, given the right technology, there are unserved markets where wind energy could be harnessed. The Aeromine generators were designed to be installed on the predominantly wind-facing edge of flat-topped commercial or industrial rooftops, such as warehouses, big-box retail stores, and even large apartment complexes.

OMG NEW WIND TURBINE JUST DROPPED.

Last week, Chiquita Brands International — one of the world’s largest banana distributors — was found liable in a Florida court for financing a Colombian paramilitary group. The ruling marks a landmark moment for corporate accountability: It is the first time a U.S. corporation has been held liable for human rights violations abroad in connection to their business operations. As momentous as this victory is in its own right, it also illustrates the ineffectiveness of voluntary corporate social responsibility initiatives — and the need for strong civil society institutions to protect human rights.

Yeah a follow up of last week, and it was pointed out on tumblr that the suit against Chiquita Banana was basically a drop in the bucket. More has to be done. Corporations will never do the right thing voluntarily, they must be forced to do so.

And on that note we’re done for the week, everyone have a good weekend, try and stay cool. I know I’m trying my hardest.

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