Catching Some Rays

Solar Farms, Remembering Compuserve

Throwing a few solar panels on your roof can reduce your energy bill. And the ones that cover many school parking lots in my county are a step in the right direction. But to make the kind of impact required to hit climate related goals, we need massive solar installations and for those we need big plots of land. But here's the rub: "To meet these federally mandated climate goals, the solar industry requires land, and lots of it, but many rural and predominantly conservative areas remain unfriendly to renewable energy." One solution catching on is called Agrivoltaics: "The practice of sharing energy and food production on the same plot of land — that can include a range of agricultural practices, such as farming, beekeeping, agroforestry, aquaculture and solar grazing." The lightbulb moment: When landowners realize that they can monetize the same plot of land twice. WaPo (Gift Article): Under a Texas sun, agrivoltaics offer farmers a new way to make money.

+ "The electrical grid in Texas has breezed through a summer in which, despite milder temperatures, the state again reached record levels of energy demand. It did so largely thanks to the substantial expansion of new solar farms." NYT (Gift Article): America’s Oil Country Increasingly Runs on Renewables.

+ Seems like a reasonable time to ponder the difference between political pandering and the real solutions happening on the ground while listening to Texas Sun.

2

Throwing Shade

Solar is all about capturing the sun's energy. Some more newfangled climate efforts are aimed at blocking some of that energy. "As the perils of climate change become more extreme, interest in the idea, known as stratospheric solar geoengineering, is growing. Scientists at Harvard, Cornell, Colorado State and Princeton are studying it and the University of Chicago recently launched an ambitious research program. But all geoengineering is not created equal. While universities are pouring millions of dollars into research, others, avowing concern about global warming and seeing a business opportunity, are barreling ahead without any scientific study. Mr. Iseman got the idea for Make Sunsets from a sci-fi novel." And so we join a group of start-up employees with "mohawks, mustaches and camouflage shorts" as they head for the hills with tanks filled with sulfur dioxide and helium. NYT (Gift Article): In Silicon Valley, a Rogue Plan to Alter the Climate. (These guys already made me nervous when they were building AI Chatbots...)

3

Foe Mo

From SCOTUS to book bans to abortion laws to anti-LGBTQ legislation, the religious right is central to American politics. It's also often central to foreign relations. And, particularly when it comes to anti-gay movements, the movement has made for some interesting bedfellows. WSJ (Gift Article): Russia and U.S. Religious Conservatives See Common Foe in Africa: Gay Rights. "Slater, a prominent Mormon activist and the wife of a senior Intel executive, has spent the past quarter-century working with officials from Africa, Europe and the Middle East to oppose abortion, gay marriage and sex education not centered on abstinence. Now, the mother of seven’s efforts have merged with a broader, ultraconservative movement that encompasses the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin, African politicians and activists from the American Religious Right." (If you're pursuing the same goals as Putin, maybe you're not on the path toward righteousness. But then again, these folks tend to love Trump, too.)

4

Sight Unseen

"There are factors that make it much more likely - living in East Asia is one of those. It is also down to genetics - the traits children inherit from their parents - but there are other factors too, such as the particularly young age (two years old) that children start their education in places like Singapore and Hong Kong. This means they are spending more time focusing on books and screens with their eyes during their early years, which strains the eye muscles." Whatever the reasons, the problem is growing and the pandemic era seemed to make it even worse. BBC: One in three children short-sighted, study suggests. I had to adjust my glasses to make sure I was reading that stat correctly.

5

Extra, Extra

Borderliner Notes: "As midnight nears, the lights of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, fill the sky on the silent banks of the Rio Grande. A few months ago, hundreds of asylum-seeking families, including crying toddlers, waited for an opening to crawl through razor wire from Juarez into El Paso. No one is waiting there now. Nearly 500 miles away, in the border city of Eagle Pass, large groups of migrants that were once commonplace are rarely seen on the riverbanks these days." AP: One day along the Texas-Mexico border shows that realities shift more rapidly than rhetoric.

+ Proxy War: "Israel’s army chief says the military is preparing for a possible ground incursion into Lebanon. His remarks come as the IDF announced it is calling up two reserve brigades 'for operational missions in the northern sector.' A Hezbollah missile intercepted near Israel’s economic center Tel Aviv is the first fired by the militant group to reach close to the city, the Israeli military said. Hezbollah said it had targeted the headquarters of Israel’s intelligence service Mossad." Here's the latest on the escalation from CNN. What do Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis all have in common? They're all backed by Iran. That's why this battle has global implications. And it doesn't just involve those doing the fighting. Iran brokering Russia-Houthi talks on arming group with anti-ship missiles.

+ Divided Nations: Sometimes a headline tells the whole story. And this story has a sad and disturbing ending. Missouri executes Marcellus Williams despite prosecutors and the victim’s family asking that he be spared.

+ Swiped: "We allege that Visa has unlawfully amassed the power to extract fees that far exceed what it could charge in a competitive market ... Merchants and banks pass along those costs to consumers, either by raising prices or reducing quality or service. As a result, Visa’s unlawful conduct affects not just the price of one thing – but the price of nearly everything." Department of Justice sues Visa, alleges the card issuer monopolizes debit card markets.

+ FT Ex: "Ellison, 29, pleaded guilty to seven felony counts of fraud and conspiracy and testified as a prosecution witness in the trial of Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of fraud and other charges last year and is serving a 25-year prison sentence arising from FTX's 2022 collapse." Bankman-Fried's ex-girlfriend Ellison gets two-year sentence over crypto fraud.

+ Attacking the Truth: "The reporting described how, with then-Gov. Phil Bryant in office, Favre and a handful of others scored millions of dollars that were supposed to go to welfare families but were instead used on projects that included a college volleyball facility and a concussion drug company ... It was against that backdrop last spring, a month shy of her 29th birthday, that Wolfe won the Pulitzer and celebrated with family, friends and colleagues at Hal & Mal's, a Jackson institution. It was a moment that should have capped the journey on a story Wolfe had been chasing for five years. Instead, not long after the Pulitzers were announced, the former governor sued Mississippi Today for defamation, setting off a battle that not only soured Wolfe's and Mississippi Today's moment but, more troubling to Wolfe, turned the focus away from the scandal itself." Mark Fainaru-Wada (who knows a whole lot about breaking news about sports scandals) in ESPN: Threatened with jail over a scandal headlined by Brett Favre.

+ Serve Notice: "Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the birthplace of our hyper-connected Internet age, the hub of companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook. However, a pioneering company here in central Ohio is responsible for developing and popularizing many of the technologies we take for granted today." 45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web. (About an hour later, I started sending newsletters.) "The company started in 1969 as a subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance. It was initially a computer time-sharing service. It offered data processing power to businesses that didn't have their own mainframe computers."

6

Bottom of the News

"It is a fundamental law of media history: as soon as a new communications technology emerges, people will use it to make pictures of cats. And those cat pictures show not only the special relationship between humans and their pets, but the changing ways that humans relate to one another." How cat memes went viral 100 years ago.

+ And one place where cat memes are not appreciated: The 2024 Bird Photographer of the Year Competition.