News Feeds | ecology.iww.org (2024)

Common Dreams - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 12:55

Today, the Biden Administration announced new efforts to lower rents and address housing affordability by proposing a cap on rent increases and investing in housing development. Groundwork’s Chief Economist Dr. Rakeen Mabud applauded the action with the following statement:

“Across the country, tenants are being gouged by landlords who are exploiting a housing shortage to profit off of families' basic need for shelter. With today's announcement, the Biden Administration has answered the call from tenants and taken an important step to check the greed of landlords and give families some breathing room.”

Categories: F. Left News

It's Going Down - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 12:43

Antifascist researchers at GDL Exposed are reporting that a group of violent neo-Nazis who rallied in Tennessee on Monday, July 15th with swastika flags and attacked a bartender who confronted them, are staying at a rental in Kentucky. According to a press release from Nashville officials:

Central Precinct officers tonight charged a Nazi flag carrying protestor with felony aggravated assault for using the flagpole to strike a downtown bartender who had just been involved in a physical altercation with members of the Neo-Nazi protest group…Ryan Scott McCann, 29, of Ontario, Canada, is also charged with disorderly conduct. A judicial commissioner ordered that he be held in lieu of $81,000 bond, which will require a source hearing before a Davidson County judge….McCann was part of a group of Neo-Nazi protestors who carried Nazi flags and spread white supremacist rhetoric this afternoon on Broadway at 3rd Avenue to the displeasure of passersby.

The Goyim Defense League (GDL) are known for pushing baseless anti-Semitic conspiracy theories through flyers and banner drops and openly flying swastika flags. The group’s leader, Jon Minadeo, originally from the bay area, has since moved to Florida after being exposed by local antifascists.

Nashville has seen several neo-Nazi rallies in the past few weeks, with Patriot Front holding an unannounced march through the city on July 4th. Patriot Front is a rebrand of Vanguard America, one of the neo-Nazi groups which marched in Charlottesville in August of 2017. James Alex Fields, who marched with the group, drove his car though a group of protesters, killing Heather Heyer.

According to GDL Exposed:

The neo-Nazi group Goyim Defense League has been harassing and assaulting Nashville residents since Saturday as part of their 6th “Name The Nose Tour.” About 20 members of the hate group have traveled across the US and Canada to attend this event and are staying in a vacation rental property [in] Scottsville, KY.

In a video the GDL took for social media, and have now deleted, several GDL members can be seen bagging up flyers that litter communities across the country.

According to Evolve Property Management, the manager of the rental property the Nazis are staying in, the unit is reserved as for “personal use” by the property’s owner from July 12th to the 22nd; the exact duration of the GDL hate tour. We have contacted the property owner and their relatives to let them know that violent neo-Nazis are using it as a home base to attack people in Nashville, but we have not received a reply at time of publication.

GLD Exposed goes on to write that the owner of the property has a “social media presence [that] suggests that she is a far right-wing supporter and may be sympathetic to the Nazis she is hosting.”

In response to ongoing activity and violence from out of town neo-Nazis, locals are organizing a counter-protest on July 16th.

Categories: D1. Anarchism

Red, Green, and Blue - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 12:00

If you’ve been listening to the podcast/reading Week En Review, then you know that I’m passionate about my garden, specifically about adding native plants that are good for pollinators, can handle drought conditions, and take little fuss from me. By Chelsea Henderson EcoRight News/ RepublicEN Now, I’m just a novice. But I listen and watch […]

The post EcoRight Speaks podcast – Entomologist, ecologist and conservationist Doug Tallamy appeared first on Red, Green, and Blue.

Categories: H. Green News

Alaska Wilderness League - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 11:26

In the wake of Earth Day, the Biden administration took a significant step forward for environmental conservation by announcing regulations safeguarding 13 million acres in the Western Arctic. This move not only signified a commitment to preserving vital ecosystems – especially around the Arctic’s five Special Areas – but also set the stage for future conservation efforts. However, the path to progress is not always straightforward, especially when political agendas clash with environmental stewardship.

Within weeks of this Western Arctic regulation finalization, House and Senate Republicans swiftly mobilized to challenge this conservation regulation using a powerful legislative tool known as the Congressional Review Act (CRA). But what exactly is a CRA, and why does it matter in the context of America’s Arctic?

A CRA empowers Congress to overturn certain federal agency actions, particularly final rules like the recently enacted Western Arctic conservation regulation. Within 60 days of a final rule’s issuance, Congress can introduce a CRA vote to nullify it. If this vote garners support in both the House and the Senate AND receives presidential approval (or overcomes a presidential veto), the rule is effectively revoked.

What’s concerning is the expedited nature of CRA votes. As privileged motions, they can be brought to the floor with minimal notice, leaving little time for thorough deliberation (which is why you’re just hearing about this from us now). House Republicans, in particular, are poised to exploit this procedural advantage, fueled by dissent from Alaska’s congressional delegation and their allies over the administration’s conservation initiatives.

The implications of a successful CRA vote are profound. Not only would it derail the Western Arctic conservation regulation, but it would also undermine the Biden administration’s broader climate and conservation agenda.

Do we expect this CRA to be successful? No. However, the setback of even introducing a CRA underscores the urgency of the moment and the need for proactive engagement on Alaskan conservation from stakeholders and lawmakers moving forward.

For advocates like us, the fight against this CRA represents a critical opportunity to defend America’s Arctic and demonstrate our commitment to longstanding protections that can’t be easily overturned. By urging Hill champs to oppose the CRA vote, we expect to thwart efforts that would jeopardize vital environmental protections – now and into the future.

The stakes are high, not just for the Arctic but for future generations and global conservation efforts. America’s Arctic serves as a cornerstone of biodiversity, recreation, and climate resilience, making it imperative to safeguard against short-sighted policy decisions.

As the political landscape shifts and debates unfold on Capitol Hill, the fate of America’s Arctic faces continual threats. Now is the time for an unwavering commitment to protect one of our planet’s most precious ecosystems. The decisions made today will reverberate for years to come, shaping the future of America’s Arctic and our collective environmental legacy.

The post Protecting America’s Arctic: Battling Backlash Against Conservation Efforts appeared first on Alaska Wilderness League.

Categories: G2. Local Greens

Audubon Society - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 10:54

Categories: G3. Big Green

Audubon Society - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 10:46

Categories: G3. Big Green

Common Dreams - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 10:39

Today, after deliberating for two days, a jury found New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez guilty of all 16 counts in a federal corruption trial, including bribery, obstruction of justice, and acting as a foreign agent. The senator was accused of accepting gifts in exchange for official favors to Egypt and Qatar. The gifts, from New Jersey businessmen, include cash, gold bars, luxury watches, car payments to his wife, and more.

The senator is the first sitting member of Congress to be charged with conspiracy by a public official to act as a foreign agent. He continues to sit on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged with shaping the country’s international policy and affairs.

Statement of Common Cause President and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón

“When we choose our elected leaders, we place a high level of trust in them to represent our interests and protect our freedoms. After a guilty verdict from a jury of his peers who heard all the facts of the case, Senator Menendez has broken the trust of New Jersey voters.

When we see our leaders sell their influence, we lose faith that democracy is worth participating and believing in. That’s why Common Cause has long advocated for an independent ethics office, rather than relying on senators to referee themselves, especially in an election year.

It is foundational to our representative democracy that our leaders in Washington put their own personal interests aside in favor of the public interest.

Rather than serve the voters, Senator Menendez sold them out for his own personal profit. He must resign.”

Categories: F. Left News

Common Dreams - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 10:38

Following the conviction in the bribery trial of Sen. Bob Menendez, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington President Noah Bookbinder, a former federal corruption prosecutor, released the following statement:

“After years of ducking accountability for corruption, Sen. Bob Menendez has finally been convicted by a jury of his peers. There is no room in the Senate for a convicted felon, especially not one convicted of taking bribes. He must resign today or be immediately expelled.”

Categories: F. Left News

Common Dreams - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 10:25

People’s Action today applauded President Biden’s announcement of a plan to cap rents for tenants living in corporate-owned properties and to invest in public housing as part of a package of reforms aimed at getting housing costs under control for poor and working-class families. The announcement comes after years of tenant organizing by People’s Action’s Homes Guarantee campaign and allies, which have focused on federal action to address ever-increasing housing costs and regulate the rent.

“Biden’s rent cap plan is a big step toward our vision of a country where everyone has a safe, accessible, sustainable, and permanently affordable home–a Homes Guarantee,” People’s Action Campaigns Director Sondra Youdelman said. “Greedy corporate landlords are driving up costs for working class people of every race, gender, and background–and when we organize together, we can win.”

Organizing Gets the Goods

Over the past three years, People’s Action’s Homes Guarantee campaign, the organization’s state-based member groups, and grassroots leaders have pushed for federal action to regulate the rent and condition federal backing of mortgages for rental properties on price hike restrictions and otherwise protect tenants. Key moments include:

• A “Tenant Takeover” in Washington, D.C., in Nov. 2023 with more than 100 tenant leaders, which included meetings with public officials and a press conference with congressional leaders, calling for rent regulations and presenting President Biden with a draft executive order. Tenants also took direct nonviolent action to fight back against corporate landlord Starwood Capital. View photos from the Tenant Takeover here and live-streams here.
• A massive tenant response organized by the campaign to an FHFA Request for Input on tenant protections including: the submission of over 2,400 comments by tenants and allies; a canvass in which tenants knocked 5,165 doors, the formation of five new tenant unions, and the submission of a comment and letter signed by 317 housing justice organizations.
• Site visits organized by the campaign between FHFA Director Sandra Thompson and tenants in federally-backed mortgages, along with a memo making the case for rent regulations to address the rental supply gap.
• A protest outside the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the lobbyists of the biggest corporate landlords in the country, the National Multifamily Housing Council, in July 2024, demanding an end to excessive rent hikes and for the FHFA to regulate the rent and protect tenants.
• A memo shared by the campaign with the White House in 2022 from 200+ legal partners and housing justice and tenant-led organizations, urging actions to curb rent inflation.
• Historic organizing since 2021 to bring delegations of tenants to engage with the FHFA, FTC, CFPB, Treasury, Congress, White House, and corporate landlords. The campaign organized a groundswell of support for the FHFA to regulate rent including Sen. Majority Leader Schumer, 17 U.S. Senators on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, Ranking Member Maxine Waters and other U.S. Representatives on the Financial Services Committee; 32 leading economists; 143 academics; 73 climate researchers; and more than 70 local elected officials.

The Stakes in 2024

“Organizing is how we make big change in this country, and voting sets the table,” People’s Action Executive Director Sulma Arias said. “We have a set of additional protections for which we are organizing under the Biden/Harris administration in our People’s Platform, and we will get there by organizing renters, unhoused people, and low-income home owners. By contrast, under Project 2025, Trump wants to be our greedy landlord-in-chief and raise costs for renters so his corporate donors can make more profit.”

Project 2025 calls for gutting government programs designed to get costs down for working-class people, including the $35 billion Biden/Harris Housing Supply Fund, which supports construction of affordable housing.

Biden’s full list of reforms includes rent caps, calling on state and local governments to build affordable housing, repurposing federal land for affordable housing unit construction, and to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to rehabilitate distressed housing, build more affordable housing, and revitalize neighborhoods across the country. The plan also calls on state and local governments to invest in public housing. President Biden also recently announced new protections requiring notice for tenants when leases end and a grace period before imposing late fees.

Categories: F. Left News

Red, Green, and Blue - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 09:00

For decades, states have relied on gas taxes to provide much of the money to maintain roads and bridges. But as cars become more fuel efficient, and some Americans switch to electric vehicles, state leaders say the gas tax won’t pay the bills for much longer. By Alex Brown Stateline At the same time, many […]

The post Gas taxes can’t pay for roads much longer, but Amazon deliveries might appeared first on Red, Green, and Blue.

Categories: H. Green News

Resource Recycling News - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 08:31

WM seeks permit to build Oregon MRF

WM is planning a new MRF in the Portland, Oregon, area that will process up to 140,000 tons of residential materials annually and come on line as early as December of this year.

Continue Reading→

The post WM seeks permit to build Oregon MRF appeared first on Resource Recycling News.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Resource Recycling News - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 08:30

Amazon cites business growth for rise in plastic use

In its 2023 sustainability report, global retail powerhouse Amazon highlighted its efforts to reduce packaging materials and to make its packaging suitable for curbside collection but provided few details on PCR usage.

In the year, Amazon used 88,698 metric tons of plastic packaging globally, higher by 3% from 2022, the company said in the report, citing business growth.

Amazon reported a 12% rise in full-year net sales for 2023. Globally, the company delivered nearly 6 billion packages, also higher by about 12% over 2022.

In the U.S. and Canada, Amazon used 83,513 metric tons of single-use plastic packaging – accounting for 94% of its global usage. North America represented 61% of Amazon's global business, with international business and Amazon Web Services comprising the remainder, according to the company's annual report.

Amazon used 877 metric tons of single-use plastic in Europe, 1,015 in India, and a combined 2,362 in countries including Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and the UAE.

Globally, the average weight of single-use plastic packaging per shipment fell by 9%, as Amazon streamlined packaging and substituted paper for plastic pillows.

In October 2023, Amazon replaced all of its outbound plastic delivery packaging including air pillows with 100% household-recyclable paper filler at its first U.S. automated fulfillment center in Ohio. The paper is made from 100% recycled content.

In 2023, 50% of Amazon deliveries were in either padded or unpadded flexible packaging, made of plastic and/or paper. This is slightly higher than in 2021 and 2022, when the share was 49%.

In the U.S. and Canada, 99.7% of mixed-material mailers, which contain both plastic and paper, were replaced with recyclable paper alternatives, the company said in the report.

At the same time, products shipping in their own packaging rose to 12% of total deliveries, from 11% in 2022 and 8% in 2021. Corrugated boxes fell to 38%, down from 40% and 43% in 2022 and 2021 respectively.

Also in 2023, Amazon made packaging fully recyclable for 90% of product launches, higher than the 79% reported in 2022.

In JUne the company announced it had removed 95% of plastic air pillows from delivery packaging in North America, and was working toward full removal by the end of 2024.

Recycled content
In 2023, Amazon Web Services began to transition to plastic containing recycled and bio-based content in parts including air ducts, power distribution board covers, card holders, SSD carriers/cages, riser brackets, latches and trays, the company said in the report.

However, the company did not provide details as to what types of plastics were used, the percentage of recycled content, or whether the plastics contained PCR or PIR.

Amazon Essentials apparel also began using recycled polyester, with the recycled textile fiber representing 16% of polyester used in 2023. The company did not provide amounts, however.

"Amazon aims to increase the use of recycled fabrics in Amazon private brands apparel products, including moving from conventional to recycled polyester and launching products made from innovative recycled fibers," the company said in the report.

The company added: "We partner with industry peers and expert organizations, such as the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, to improve recycling infrastructure. Amazon also works with The Recycling Partnership to help launch recycling programs in communities across the U.S. Our 2023 investment helped TRP start recycling programs that reached more than 36,000 households and recycled 1 million pounds of materials."

AWS is also working to use steel from electric arc furnaces, which use scrap steel, in rack enclosures, increasing the recycled content from 10% to 90%.

Continue Reading→

The post Amazon cites business growth for rise in plastic use appeared first on Resource Recycling News.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Resource Recycling News - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 08:30

Planned carton facility will create West Coast end market

By the second half of 2025, a new facility will be turning out roofing construction materials made from 1.5 million pounds of post-consumer cartons per month on the West Coast.

Continue Reading→

The post Planned carton facility will create West Coast end market appeared first on Resource Recycling News.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Resource Recycling News - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 08:29

Recycling sector weathers the effects of Beryl

As the first major hurricane of the season hit Texas last week, MRFs and processors braced for disrupted services, flooding and power outages, which are familiar obstacles for Gulf Coast operators each June through November.

Continue Reading→

The post Recycling sector weathers the effects of Beryl appeared first on Resource Recycling News.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Resource Recycling News - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 08:29

Washington mill to close, citing OCC prices, market demand

Just five years after converting to use 100% recycled fiber in containerboard production, McKinley Paper Company will idle its mill in Port Angeles, Washington, in August. A company representative said West Coast OCC prices and depressed containerboard demand contributed to the closure.

Continue Reading→

The post Washington mill to close, citing OCC prices, market demand appeared first on Resource Recycling News.

Categories: B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Waging Nonviolence - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 08:20

This article The only antidote to election anxiety is training to confront Trump’s threat was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Breathe deeply.

The July 13 shooting attempt to assassinate Donald Trump may be a symptom of desperation in our country. Loners can be symptoms of growing despair. Whether he emerges a victor in November or a defeated candidate claiming he was robbed, movements for justice and peace need to offer something more specific than what they’re presently doing in order to take account of the deepening anxiety around how to deal with Trump.

While issue-based organizing campaigns need to continue, our climate, economic and racial justice work don’t sufficiently address this rising anxiety. On my recent 20-state book tour, visiting over 50 towns and cities across the country, I observed more anxiety than I’ve seen in decades. Even while climate disasters are bringing new people to awareness and action, the possibility of a dictatorship — or an angry loser flailing at us — is worrisome. We activists need to signal preparation for dealing with Trump, however the November election turns out.

The challenge can be met on the level of organizing as well as with psychological empowerment. I found in my half-century of training experience (starting with the civil rights movement) that when facing uncertainty, we need training. Training workshops can go beyond facts and discussion. They provide a format for transforming anxiety into action and — just as important — a solidarity that offers protection.

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Training as an emotional as well as strategic preparation

While the kind of training deployed during the Montgomery bus boycott in the mid-1950s spread throughout the civil rights movement, its power was perhaps best demonstrated during the Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign of 1964. Northern volunteers — mostly students — were recruited to go to that state to do grassroots activism.

I was on the training staff for the preparatory training held in an Ohio college. Half the volunteers were assigned to be trained the first week, and the rest in the second. It was almost a thousand in total — an extraordinary number of volunteers, I thought, given the terrifying prospect they were facing.

Previous Coverage

We relied heavily on bonding activities as well as role-plays of situations the students needed to learn to handle nonviolently, especially the likelihood of violent threat. At the end of the first week students boarded the buses bound for the South, and we on the staff got a short break before the next group of students arrived.

On the second day of the second week we were abruptly called into the college auditorium. There we were told that three volunteers had already disappeared and were presumed dead. At that moment I looked around the auditorium at the students and — seeing the shock on their faces — pictured most of them gone by the end of the day, called home by frantic parents.

We on the training staff doubled down on the “heart” side of the training, using our role-plays, extending the debriefings, and supplementing with singing and other means of building solidarity. To my amazement, nearly all the students actually got on buses at the end of the week and headed toward a state where the Ku Klux Klan was bent on violence.

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Donate Our present situation is not as threatening

Racist whites in Mississippi in those days felt they were defending an existential challenge: a deeply rooted, historic supremacy intensified when they lost their bloody civil war. The threat they experienced from racial justice was multi-dimensional. It felt like the end of social life as they knew it.

The stakes for Trumpists are not nearly as high, despite right-wing militias preparing for violence.

Nevertheless, the Trump threat is serious enough to need the power of training. Fortunately, we know more now about training for nonviolent conflict than we did in the ‘60s. Many people — activists and educators eager to increase the power of their methods — have experimented and found reliable methods for preparing people in conflict skills. We’ll need those skills, whether Trump is elected president and tries to rule as dictator or whether he’s defeated and we experience some form of grassroots violence on his behalf.

Four years ago I led a defense-against-Trump training effort for Choose Democracy via Zoom that reached tens of thousands of people. We focused not only on methods of action, but also the strategy question of what makes the timing and location for using those methods more (and less) effective.

I’m glad we included the latter!After Trump’s defeat, he directed his followers to make trouble at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6.Anti-Trump activists wisely avoided showing up and getting caught in the fracas — a move they might have made had they not gone through our training. Trump and others were certainly angered by this, judging by their initial (and ultimately failed) attempt to blame the storming of the Capitol on antifa.

Both a website and a book “What If Trump Wins” says “You can only prepare for what you can imagine.”

Now, another election cycle later, Choose Democracy is back. See our new website WhatIfTrumpwins.org, where you can go through our interactive “pick-your-path adventure” manual designed to meet the Trumpist threat head on. I’m also conducting a series of interviews for Waging Nonviolence with people who’ve successfully faced an authoritarian threat — in one case successfully overthrowing a dictator, and in another (soon to be published) overthrowing the long-established racist Apartheid regime of South Africa.

Meanwhile, other organizations are getting into this preparation phase, including the Horizons Project, the 22nd Century Initiative and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.

Hands-on training needed

I’m welcoming the resources that are now arriving to help us to prepare our minds for a serious nonviolent struggle with the Trump forces. I also know from my experience on multiple continents that reading cannot fully substitute for in-person training. We all benefit from in-person workshops that prepare us to defend our communities, and the degree of freedom presently experienced in the U.S.

Zoom is a helpful channel but not, I believe, as valuable in preparing for prolonged intense struggle as in-person training workshops. In addition to learning more deeply what works, we’ll also need courage and creativity. Both of these are hugely strengthened by bonding with others. In-person trainings offer bonding, the chance to find or solidify buddies or comrades when the struggle erupts nearby.

I suggest you identify an experienced trainer (or, better, a team) in your area and ask them to facilitate workshops. It’s helpful if they have direct action experience, but not strictly necessary. Ask them to read the literature now coming out about the Trumpist threat, as well as “Facilitating Group Learning,” my book on training that shares a half century of experience in conflicts. One reason to use my manual is that it pays particular attention to training people for meeting challenging and even anxiety-provoking situations.

It helps to ask someone you know to go to the workshop with you — and, of course, to then share all the tips, perspectives, articles and other helpful resources you come across on defending your future.

This article The only antidote to election anxiety is training to confront Trump’s threat was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Categories: B4. Radical Ecology

Skeptical Science - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 08:03

Dr. Ella Gilbertis a climate scientist and presenter with a PhD in Antarctic climate change, working at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Her background is in atmospheric sciences and she's especially interested in the physical mechanisms of climate change, clouds, and almost anything polar. She is passionate about communicating climate science to non-specialist audiences and using film and TV to do it. After all, climate change affects everyone, so everyone should be able to understand it. To help with that, she publishes videos about climate science, Antarctica, weather and anything climate related on her Youtube channel called Dr Gilbz.

Here is a sample of her videos to "showcase" her work, each with a description based on what Ella provided on Youtube for it.

Climate extremes are reshaping Antarctica - published Aug 21, 2023

Antarctica is experiencing more and more extreme events, driven in large part by climate change. These extremes are changing the polar environment, with consequences for us all. Lots of this video is based on new work by Siegert et al. (2023).

Is climate changing faster than expected? - published Sept 15, 2023

It feels from the news like climate change is happening faster and faster every year – so are the extremes of 2023 taking us by surprise? The answer is not… entirely. Climate is changing pretty much as we expect, but the impacts are a different story.

Antarctic climate change is taking us by surprise- published Oct 17, 2023

While global temperature rise may be behaving as predicted, there are certain regions on earth where climate change is happening way faster than expected. And nowhere is that more true than the polar regions.

2°C is too high for the world’s ice #COP28 - published Dec 4, 2023

“We can’t negotiate with the melting point of ice”.

A sobering new report shows that warming of 2 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures will spell disaster for the world’s frozen cryosphere. But as the world’s leaders meet in Dubai to discuss climate action, it’s clear there’s a huge gap between what needs to happen, and what countries are committed to delivering.

For this video, Dr Ella Gilbert met Dr James Kirkham, Chief Scientific Advisor for the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative, who is working hard to translate the science in this report into real-world policy. If you would like to see the full interview Ella recorded with him, head over to her patreon page where it's free to watch.

Antarctica might raise sea levels more than we thought - published July 5, 2024

The West Antarctic is currently chucking a load of ice into the ocean, adding rapidly to sea levels. And now, three new scientific studies have shown that the ice sheets may be more sensitive to warming than previously thought. These new findings could revise our sea level rise estimates upwards. Dr Ella Gilbert spoke to Dr Alex Bradley, who was involved in two of these new studies, about what this means, and why it doesn’t mean we should give up on climate action.

This is just a small sample of the videos Ella has been publishing since starting her Youtube channel several years ago and there are many more to watch on herDr Gilbz channel (likethis one or this). Check them out and if you like what you see, subscribe to her channel to not miss any of her future videos. They'll be well worth your time!

You can also find her onLinkedIn,Instagram and X/Twitter and support her work via Patreon.

Categories: I. Climate Science

Solar Industry Magazine - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 08:00

Avangrid Inc., a sustainable energy company and member of the Iberdrola Group, has begun to produce power from the True North solar project in Falls County, Texas, near Waco. With 20 MW commissioned thus far, this marks another major milestone for what will become the largest solar power project in Avangrid’s portfolio, and its first solar project in Texas.

“This is great news, not just for the on-time construction of True North, but for the state of Texas at large,” says Pedro Azagra, Avangrid’s CEO. “Thanks to the diligent work of our team and our contractors, we are able to supply additional energy to the Texas electrical grid as we move into the summer months. I am happy to see this project moving forward as Avangrid continues on its mission to accelerate the clean energy transition across America.”

True North will be a 238-MWac (321-MWdc) solar farm. Once the project is built, it will supply clean, renewable energy in support of Meta’s net zero commitment, including supporting its upcoming data center in neighboring Temple, its second data center facility in Texas, with 100% renewable energy. Ahead of commercial operations expected at the end of 2024, the project will supply power to customers on the Texas grid.

During its construction and operation, the project is creating local jobs and supporting local communities. It is expected to pay more than $40 million in property taxes over the life of the project, which directly supports public services including safety and fire protection, as well as local schools.

Avangrid has successfully developed, built and operated renewable energy facilities in Texas for more than 15 years, with more than 1,200 MW of installed wind capacity. The company has paid more than $100 million in property taxes from its existing facilities.

The post Avangrid Begins Producing Power from True North Solar Project appeared first on Solar Industry.

Categories:

Solar Industry Magazine - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 07:55

Mission Solar Energy, a producer of residential photovoltaic (PV) modules for over 10 years, is now manufacturing larger-format products engineered for utility as well as commercial and industrial (C&I) projects. The three new products are UFLPA-compliant, AD/CVD risk-free and ready for immediate order from the company.

“With more than 10 years of solar manufacturing experience, we have a very loyal customer base that trusts the quality and reliability of Mission Solar products,” says Sam Martens, president of Mission Solar Energy. “These new products are a direct response to customers who have been asking us to serve this industry segment.”

Mission Solar’s parent company is OCI Holdings, a diversified, multi-billion-dollar company founded in 1959 and publicly listed on the Korean stock exchange (KRX). OCI Holdings also owns a major supplier of fully ULFPA-compliant, high-purity solar-grade polysilicon. This gives Mission Solar’s procurement chain an added degree of bankable visibility and upstream leverage.

“Mission Solar Energy is excited to re-enter the C&I/utility segment,” adds Martens. “We have a history in this space, having launched our company by supplying utility scale projects in 2014. Our experience and proven track record make us well-positioned to meet the growing demands of this industry segment.”

Product Details:

545-555 W PERC Transparent Backsheet Bifacial

540-550 W PERC Dual Glass Bifacial

• 144 Half Cut, M10/182-mm cells
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La Jicarita - Tue, 07/16/2024 - 07:49

By DAVID CORREIA

Editor’s Note: David Correia is a former co-editor of La Jicarita and professor of American Studies at UNM. He’s the author of a number of books, including An Enemy Such as This, about the Navajo militant Larry Casuse, and a just released Set the Fire on Earth about a 1902 coal strike in Pennsylvania that was the genesis of modern policing.

Ike DeVargas, decorated Vietnam war vet, life-long logger, legendary political organizer, and thorn in the side of New Mexico’s rich and politically powerful, died on July 3. He was 77. A cousin said DeVargas, who lived in Servilleta Plaza, was visiting family in El Llanito when he died suddenly. No cause was given.

His given name was Antonio, but few called him that. He was Ike to everyone or, if you were a comrade, Ikey, which is what most people called him, because he had a lot of comrades. He dropped out of high school and, in 1965, joined the Marines. His first comrades were the men he fought beside in Vietnam, a war it didn’t take him long to realize “wasn’t worth a sh*t,” as he told me in a 2008 interview. He was a special forces Marine assigned to battlefield assistance, which meant flying in after the bombs were dropped. “Sometimes we could feel the concussion of the bombs. Sometimes we’d be landing right behind where the B-52s would be doing one of their starlight strikes. sh*t, they’d hit an area five miles long by a mile wide. If there was jungle, there was nothing left, and all we would do is count bodies.” It had a radicalizing effect on him. They “brainwashed us” into thinking “we were going over there to stop a dictator, a brutal dictator, blah, blah, blah and stop the spread of Communism,” he recalled. But when he came home, he found a real dictator in Rio Arriba County, politico Emilio Naranjo, a man who when he died in 2008 the Santa Fe New Mexican called “the last patrón.” For more than four decades Naranjo controlled county politics and public-sector hiring. He was the sheriff, a state senator, a U.S. Marshal, and chair of the local Democratic party, among other posts. He distributed favors, expected loyalty, and punished enemies. “Emilio has become the sort of man,” a local once told the journalist Peter Nabokov, that “no one will say anything about except that he’s a very kind and generous man we’re afraid of.”

But there were people who weren’t afraid of Naranjo, and Ikey was one of them. After the war, he bounced around at first, working in the mines in Grants, as a machinist in Denver, at a weapons plant in California. He finally returned to New Mexico and got a job as a janitor at the Los Alamos Labs, but it didn’t last long. “I used to be real violent,” he told me. “I used to like to brawl in bars and sh*t. And so if people messed with me, I would get real violent. I didn’t last in Los Alamos very long because one time I almost beat the sh*t out of a chemist. He was a racist son of a bitch and I had him up against the wall and I thought, man I’m going to end up in jail so I just quit and walked out. I finally realized I had to be in the woods to be able to survive.”

He returned to Servilleta Plaza and got a job for Duke City Lumber cutting timber in the woods above his home. He fell in with a group of other Vietnam vets. One of them introduced him to the writings of Daniel de Leon and Rodolfo Acuñaand the organizing strategies of John L. Lewis and Saul Alinksy. Together they founded a local chapter of the Chicano Movement political party Partido Nacional de La Raza Unida. For the next decade, they waged a relentless campaign against Naranjo’s political machine. Ikey’s role in it has become the stuff of legend. For more than a decade, they were relentless organizers, running Chicano candidates for every local office, filing lawsuits against every corrupt politico, staging marches and rallies, and even burning Naranjo in effigy in the parking lot of a building he owned. They joined forces with activists and organizers in Tierra Amarilla in a broad coalition. They built low-cost medical clinics and free legal aid offices. They scuttled Taos-like developments proposed for Tierra Amarilla. Naranjo unleashed his sheriff’s deputies at them in retaliation. Goons, Ikey called them, nothing but “natural headbeaters.” Cops planted drugs on La Raza Unida organizers and then arrested them and their family members. Deputies shot people in the back and then arrested them for resisting arrest. Ikey kept a running tally: eighteen shootings, three dozen arrests, and too many beatings to count in one two-year period in the mid-1970s.

When a bar owned by one of Naranjo’s goons blew up in November 1975, Naranjo had his cops arrest Moises Morales and Pedro Arechuleta, two Tierra Amarilla activists close with Ikey. There’s no way they did it, Ikey explained. That cop wasn’t worth the dynamite. He probably did it himself for the insurance money, most guessed. La Raza Unida had been so successful at organizing young Chicanos and Chicanas that no one went to the bar anymore.

To say that Ikey was fearless is not to say he had nothing to fear. Naranjo once hired a deputy “exclusively to kill me,” Ikey told me once. He “was an ex-felon that had a couple of murder charges against him before he was a deputy, and he was assigned because Emilio had a house in Gallina that sat on top of a hill that overlooked my house and that’s where he was stationed.” A former Rio Arriba county deputy confirmed the story before a Grand Jury in the late 1970s, testifying that Naranjo was planning to frame Ikey on drug charges and had talked privately about having him killed. He’d grown tired of Ikey’s embarrassing questions at public meetings and press conferences, the constant marches and rallies, and the rising tide of resistance represented by Ikey, who was always out in the front of the march, his huge head of curly hair blowing in the wind, his booming voice echoing through a bullhorn. On weekends, Ikey and other organizers would drive into Española and spend the night in the saloons organizing new members. He’d go bar to bar, his big-hearted smile instantly disarming even the most suspicious people. Ikey didn’t lecture when he organized. He asked questions instead and then listened. He drew stories out of people, and then helped them to see that their stories intersected with others, and showed them how their struggles were the shared struggles of all working people in northern New Mexico.

He never backed down. Once, at the Chamisa Inn in September 1976, while organizing for a rally planned for that Sunday, a drunk off-duty cop tried to intimidate him into leaving the bar. Ikey tried ignoring him but the cop kept taunting him and challenging him to a fight. Ikey followed him out to the parking and soon as they got there the cop pulled his gun. When the emergency vehicles arrived ten minutes later, the EMTs found the cop in the parking lot, bloodied and unconscious, his gun on the ground beside him, emptied of its bullets. The embarrassed cop claimed six men jumped him, but he changed his story after every eyewitness account told the same story. Ikey had taken the gun from the cop’s hands and pistol whipped him until he passed out. State police arrested Ikey and took him to the state penitentiary in Santa Fe, where he was held without bail for three days. He refused to let the jailers shave his moustache and sideburns, so they beat him for two days straight, making sure to do it front of other prisoners. They’d haul him out of solitary confinement in the middle of the night and beat him until the other inmates woke up. “When they attacked me, I fought back, and I broke the arm of one of them. They tried to get me indicted for assault on a guard – aggravated assault on a guard. They tried to get me indicted, but the grand jury refused to indict.” He spent three days without food in solitary confinement. Ikey’s lawyers got him released two days later and, in a scene that seems too ridiculously cinematic to be true—but sworn to by multiple inmates—Ikey walked out of the prison defiantly, with a smile on his face, and to the cheers of the other prisoners, and went right back to organizing.

When dozens of La Raza Unida organizers drifted toward the Socialist Workers Party in the early 1980s, Ikey refused to join them. He’d read Marx and Lenin, “but I guess it didn’t take,” he explained once. “We were living under an occupation,” he said, “and I didn’t think we needed any help understanding that.” He spent the 1980s and most of the 90s fighting the Forest Service and Duke City Lumber, the corporate logging company he spent years working for. Like anyone born and raised in New Mexico’s forest communities, he saw the Forest Service as an occupying force. It had cut livestock permits in the 1940s to destroy the local forest economy and force locals into low wage jobs in the timber industry. In the mid-1980s, Ikey cofounded La Compania Ocho, a logging outfit comprised of eight local loggers who joined forces to challenge Duke City, which was despised by locals for skirting safety rules, firing injured workers, and demanding (and getting) enormous timber sales that destroyed common grazing land and wildlife habitat. Ikey and La Compania took a lead role in organizing a huge coalition that developed an ambitious plan to restore the forest ecology and support forest-dependent communities, but the Forest Service refused to cooperate and blacklisted La Compania instead. “It really seems like the US Forest Service is hell bent on altering our way of life,” Ikey told me. “They’re trying to turn us into wage slaves for corporate outsiders who clear cut our forests and destroy our communities.” It was called social engineering in one document, but now we could refer to it as ethnic cleansing.

Their coalition, which initially included Santa Fe environmental organizations, began to unravel on April 15, 1993, when the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the Mexican spotted owl an endangered species, marking the start of the Forest Wars of the 1990s chronicled so brilliantly by Mark Schiller and Kay Matthews in the pages of La Jicarita News. After the listing of the owl, the Forest Guardians (now known as WildEarth Guardians) abandoned the coalition and joined a lawsuit opposing La Compania. Even though no spotted had ever been found on the Carson National Forest, and despite a federal court ruling ordering the Forest Service to give La Compania a contract to harvest timber from the woods above Vallecitos, the environmental lawsuit led to a nearly two-year ban on all logging and firewood cutting. La Compania went bankrupt, and fires eventually tore through the forest above Vallecitos.

Ikey and other organizers marched through Santa Fe carrying effigies of environmentalists, mocking their self-serving version of environmentalism. “I’ll agree to put down my chainsaw,” Ikey once said, “if they agree to stop driving their SUVs.” Years later, in a Santa Fe coffee shop, I asked Sam Hitt, a former leader of Forest Guardians, why they abandoned the coalition and La Compania. They were clear-cutting spotted owl habitat, he told me. Wasn’t it Duke City that did the clear-cutting, I asked. You’re splitting hairs, he claimed. And didn’t US Fish and Wildlife send biologists into the woods with parabolic microphones and night vision goggles. They never found a spotted owl. They’re hard to find, Hitt insisted. After meeting Hitt, I drove to Servilleta Plaza to talk to Ikey. “I don’t doubt that he loves nature,” Ikey told me, “it’s just that he wants to keep it for himself.”

Ikey slowed down as he grew older, focusing more on his family and his health, but he never stopped organizing. He ran for sheriff once on a defund police and prisons platform years ahead of its time. Ikey rejected the idea that running for office was pointless and electoral politics was reformist. “This is where we live. We can’t just lobby for change. We can’t just hope for a better future. You can’t be a threat to the politicians unless you challenge them.” His very last challenge was a recall petition against Rio Arriba County Commission chair Alex Naranjo for his failure to hold the county’s North Central Waste Authority accountable and his efforts to reinstate the controversial statue of Juan de Oñate at the County Complex. This challenge will continue in Ikey’s name.

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