Community solar is getting it done

Now if Big Energy would quit trying to hinder it.

Community solar allows customers to reap electric bill savings by subscribing to a share of a local solar project, rather than installing their own array. It’s an arrangement that ideally makes the benefits of solar more accessible to people who live in rental or multifamily housing and those who just can’t afford the upfront cost of rooftop systems. Forty-two states have community solar projects in place — but the precise nature of who has benefited remained unclear. Until now.

A June study by researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory that analyzed data from 11 states found that people who adopt community solar are 6.1 times more likely to live in multifamily buildings, are 4.4 times more likely to rent, and earn 23 percent less annual income than rooftop solar adopters, who skew wealthy.

“Community solar is delivering on its promise,” said Eric O’Shaughnessy, the lead author of the peer-reviewed study, an affiliate at LBNL, and a renewable energy research analyst at Clean Kilowatts. - Canary Media

The Gulf dead zone is still big and dead

There's been no real progress. Big Ag, among others, has seen to that.

The Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force, a collaboration of state, federal and tribal agencies charged with controlling fertilizer pollution, told Congress last fall that nitrogen loads in the Mississippi River basin decreased 23% from the baseline period to 2021.

But the five-year running average – which accounts for extremely wet and dry years more common with climate change – tells a different story. By that measure, nitrogen is only slightly below baseline and well above the 20% target. Phosphorus loads worsened since the baseline period.

The oxygen-deprived ‘dead zone’ in the Gulf is predicted to be 5,827 square miles this summer, 5% larger than average, according to a forecast last week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Two long-time Gulf researchers predict a smaller ‘dead zone’, but only because of warming ocean temperatures, not because of progress reducing nutrients in the Mississippi River basin. - Investigate Midwest

Anti-protest bills tell of the growing right-wing freakout

I get how people whose nature + nurture led them into their mindsets. Not that that excuses this.

Since Trump’s inauguration in 2017, 21 states have passed nearly 50 laws to restrict protest. In many ways, the origins of this assault can be traced to a single event nearly 10 years ago: the police killing of a Black teenager named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. His death and the protests that followed birthed the Black Lives Matter movement, a global reckoning with racism, policing, and surveillance.

State legislatures, many dominated by Republicans, have introduced over 250 anti-protest bills since the Ferguson Uprising often supported by the many of the same forces united against student protesters today: law enforcement, Republican leadership, pro-Israel lobbyists and right wing operatives.

“Americans seem to increasingly believe that protests are only legitimate and deserving of protection if they advance a message that we agree with,” says Elly Page, a senior legal advisor at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL). “If the right to protest isn’t protected for everyone, it isn’t protected for anyone.” - Mother Jones

Busting the despicable propaganda about an "immigrant crime wave"

I know that for plenty of people facts really don't matter. At least when it comes to their politics and worldviews they don't. For most it's fundamentally because they were raised that way, and don't even realize it. But for the large majority overall for whom facts do matter, albeit to varying degrees, it's good to have them ready to hand.

Republican politicians and sympathetic media outlets are claiming that America is in the midst of a violent "crime wave," driven in part by undocumented immigrants. New data, however, demonstrates that there was not a spike in violent crime in 2023. Instead, across America, rates of violent crime are dropping precipitously — and the decline is especially pronounced in border states.

In January 2024, the Republican National Committee claimed that “crime continues at historic highs in Democrat-run cities.” Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) declared in February 2024 that “[i]n Joe Biden’s America you get…cities plagued with crime.” These claims, however, are not supported by facts.

The most comprehensive look at violent crime in the United States in 2023 will come when the FBI publishes its national Uniform Crime Report. But that will not happen until the fall. But, as crime analyst Jeff Asher explains in his newsletter, the FBI report is based on individual Uniform Crime Reports submitted by each state. Asher identified 14 states that have released their Uniform Crime Reports publicly. The data has not been completely finalized and could be adjusted slightly before formally submitting it to the FBI. But this data is the best early look at violent crime trends last year. - Popular Information

Big Meat buys off academics

This has been well-known for a while, but there's new documentation out there.

Due to limited public funding for academic research, industry-funded studies on food and agriculture are common. And while researchers often strive to avoid bias and funding does not always impact research quality, evidence suggests industry-funded studies are more likely to produce results that reflect well on the funder.

In the paper, Viveca Morris and Dr. Jennifer Jacquet reveal a broader pattern of how the livestock industry, which has long had close affiliations with land-grant universities, has infiltrated universities to block climate scrutiny. The researchers trace the origins, funding, and political function of the “corporate capture of academic institutions”—especially focusing on the CLEAR Center, founded in 2018, and AgNext at Colorado State University, founded in 2020. As the authors argue, these leading academic centers wield their academic credibility to “maintain the livestock industry’s social license to operate.”

“They’re conducting industry-funded public relations and communications campaigns on climate change issues that benefit their agribusiness donors,” said Morris, the executive director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School. This effort extends far beyond industry-funded research to more actively shape policy, effectively acting like a lobbyist through frequent testimonies and meetings with policymakers, among other strategies.

Even if this is legal, “having a university—without transparency, without even telling the public that an industry donor is involved—acting as a PR arm of an industry group is impossible to justify with the university’s mission,” added Morris. - Civil Eats

Congress cowers to thieving parasites on antitrust funding

This is rather appalling, though there's still time for it to be corrected.

Heading into the State of the Union address, the White House is placing a big bet on competition policy to tackle some of the biggest challenges in the economy. (On Monday), the administration announced the creation of an interagency Strike Force on Unfair and Illegal Pricing, co-chaired by Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan and Justice Department Antitrust Division head Jonathan Kanter. Together, Khan and Kanter will coordinate efforts across the government to target companies engaged in pricing activities that violate laws around fraudulent and deceptive practices, or unfair methods of competition. The goal is to reduce prices in sectors where tricks and traps are prominent, from health care to housing to financial services.

“Competition delivers real results to real people, that’s precisely what we are doing,” said Kanter on a press call on Monday. “And we’re doing it with fewer people than we had in 1979.”

That last bit was a tell, a flash of frustration at a development over the weekend, pushed by a bipartisan group of appropriators, that could lead to a dramatic cut in the Antitrust Division’s budget, precisely at the time when the Biden administration is elevating its work—relying on it, even—in advance of the election. While some members of Congress are furious about it, the White House seems to be resigned to the outcome. - The American Prospect

Insane levels of military spending are not justified by "jobs!"

Not even if those claims were legitimate.

Lest you think that Biden’s economic pitch for such aid was a one-off event, Politico reported that, in the wake of his Oval Office speech, administration officials were distributing talking points to members of Congress touting the economic benefits of such aid. Politico dubbed this approach “Bombenomics.” Lobbyists for the administration even handed out a map purporting to show how much money such assistance to Ukraine would distribute to each of the 50 states. And that, by the way, is a tactic companies like Lockheed Martin routinely use to promote the continued funding of costly, flawed weapons systems like the F-35 fighter jet. Still, it should be troubling to see the White House stooping to the same tactics.

Yes, it’s important to provide Ukraine with the necessary equipment and munitions to defend itself from Russia’s grim invasion, but the case should be made on the merits, not through exaggerated accounts about the economic impact of doing so. Otherwise, the military-industrial complex will have yet another never-ending claim on our scarce national resources. - TomDispatch