Rutgers team wins $1 million ‘Nobel Prize for students’

Avalon R. Zoppo writes for Philly.com:

For recent Rutgers graduate Hasan Usmani, the sight of the vast Karachi slum was a shock, despite his family connections and previous visits to Pakistan.

The 8,000-acre Orangi Town, home to 2.5 million people, many of them refugees from Afghanistan and Bangladesh, is barely livable, the 23-year-old said. Lacking adequate sewer lines, its streets are awash in wastewater when it rains. One resident told Usmani her children shower only once a week so the family can afford food.

“I was surprised to see people living in these conditions and surviving,” Usmani said.

He and three other fellow business school students at Rutgers University in New Brunswick — Hanaa Lakhani, Gia Farooqi, and Moneed Mian — had gone there in May with a project in mind to help the slum residents: solar-powered rickshaws. It was a concept that had won a regional competition earlier. When they got to Pakistan, an even better idea emerged: a ride-share program to better connect impoverished residents of the shantytown to rickshaws, an Uber of sorts.

This month, their pilot program, Roshni Rides, snagged first place and $1 million in start-up capital in the prestigious Hult Prize competition, founded by Swedish businessman Bertil Hult and funded by his family. The award has been dubbed the Nobel Prize for students.
Among the runners-up? A team from Harvard.


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Mystery group picking Breitbart apart, tweet by tweet


Paul Farhi reports for The Washington Post:

Hardly anyone paid attention last November when a strangely named Twitter account, Sleeping Giants, sent its first tweet into the digisphere. “Are you aware that you’re advertising on Breitbart, the alt-right’s biggest champion, today?” read the tweet, aimed at a consumer lending outfit called Social Finance. “Are you supporting them publicly?”

Within 30 minutes, Social Finance replied, tweeting that it would stop running ads on Breitbart.

It was, it turns out, the start of an odd, and oddly effective, social media campaign against Breitbart.com, the influential conservative news site headed by Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s former campaign chairman and ex-White House chief strategist.

Sleeping Giants is a mysterious group that has no address, no organizational structure and no officers. At least none that are publicly known. All of its leaders are anonymous, and much of what it claims is difficult to independently verify. A spokesman for the group wouldn’t identify himself in interviews for this story.

But the group does have a singular purpose, pursued as relentlessly as Ahab chasing a whale: It aims to drive advertisers away from Breitbart. “We’re trying to defund bigotry,” the spokesman says.



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Longtime business owners see an upside to gentrification

A&A Bake & Double Shop on Nostrand AvenueJeremy Smerd, editor of Crain’s, writes:In the four-plus years I’ve lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Noel Brown has gone from fearing gentrification to embracing it. That’s because his business is booming. Not only have his old customers not left, but he has also gained new ones. Like me.I used to pass Brown’s Bake Double Shop daily on my way to the Nostrand Avenue A station. Invariably a line would snake out of the 300-square-foot spot onto the sidewalk as customers waited to pay a couple of bucks for doubles—Trinidadian street food that consists of two fried flatbreads filled with curried chickpeas.I have since moved to another part of the neighborhood. Soon Brown will be moving too. In the coming weeks he’ll open a 3,000-square-foot restaurant on Fulton Street that will serve lunch and dinner—in addition to his signature doubles. His staff of eight will grow considerably. “I was skeptical,” said Brown, whose small shop has been open for 17 years. “The original people were moving out, and new people were moving in. But my business exceeds the limit I was thinking about by 15%.”The story of Bed-Stuy is Brown’s writ large. Since he opened his shop, the number of businesses in the neighborhood has grown by 73%, to 1,910, as violent crime fell by 44%, according to a report published last week by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. Employment is at a record high, having increased by 45%, to around 17,000 jobs since the end of the Great Recession.
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Military authorization bill passes Senate with PFC language


Kyle Bagenstoes reports for the Courier-Times:

The U.S. Senate Monday night passed a $700 billion military authorization bill, which includes $7 million for a nationwide health study on communities impacted by perfluorinated compound contamination. Those are chemicals found in firefighting foam, the use of which contaminated the drinking water of tens of thousands of residents and military personnel in Bucks and Montgomery counties.
Both the authorization bill and the health study measure have high hurdles to clear before coming to fruition: They need to survive reconciliation with the House’s authorization bill, as well as a separate military appropriations process later this year.
The National Defense Authorization Act passed Monday is considered a “must pass” bill, as Congress has voted on it each year for more than half a century in order to authorize military operations and spending. It has become a favorite for elected officials looking for a place to win funding for initiatives or enact policies.
Senators with districts impacted by PFC contamination in drinking water, primarily near military bases such as those impacted locally, zeroed in on the bill this year.
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NJ won’t reach its 2050 climate goals without changes


New report says state lacks coherent, comprehensive strategy to significantly reduce carbon footprint by midcentury

Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight:

smog

The state is going to require much steeper reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions to reach a goal to lower carbon pollution to 1990 levels by 2050, according to a new report by researchers at the Rutgers Climate Institute.
A decade after New Jersey enacted the Global Warming Response Act, the report found the state lacks a detailed and comprehensive strategy to achieve its goal and warned its emissions trajectory under current policies is inconsistent with the mid-century target.
The 179-page report is likely to provide a blueprint to the next administration on what steps may be needed to curb GHG emissions by 80 percent, which will require a 76 percent reduction from today’s pollution levels.


Smaller carbon footprint

But it stops short of making specific recommendations while examining a range of policies that other states are trying in an effort to reduce their carbon footprints, as well as many strategies frequently debated among New Jersey policymakers.
“The good news in New Jersey is that there’s a lot of existing authority and programs to advance the sort of climate action we need to meet the 2050 limits,’’ said Jeanne Herb, associate director of the Environmental Analysis and Communications Group at Rutgers-New Brunswick’s Bloustein School and one of the report’s authors.
The bad news is some of those policies have been talked about and lobbied at length without ever happening. Among the actions that could be taken with existing authority are steps to develop offshore wind capacity along the Jersey coast; mandates to achieve targeted reductions in energy use; and rejoining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multistate effort to curb global warming pollution from power plants.


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Cities Cracking Down on Climate Law-Breakers

BY COURTNEY HUMPHRIES, INSIDECLIMATE NEWS

New York's Hearst Tower was built to use 26 percent less energy than required by code. Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
New York’s Hearst Tower was built to use 26 percent less energy than required by code, with an emphasis on natural lighting and temperature controls and sensors to reduce waste. The mayor’s proposed energy code updates aim to reduce energy use in more buildings. Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty
To mitigate climate change, cities need to target buildings—the “mother lode” of greenhouse gas emissions, as New York Mayor Bill De Blasio called them last week.
At a news conference, he announced a pathbreaking proposal to set stricter energy efficiency standards in the city’s aging buildings—and to fine building owners who don’t comply with the codes.
Other cities may need to crack down, too, if they are to meet their climate goals. Across the U.S., cities have pledged to reduce emissions, with some (like New York) aiming ambitiously for 80 percent reductions by 2050.
“If you’re a city that’s concerned about climate change, you have to focus on buildings, because that’s where the carbon is,” says Cliff Majersik, executive director of the Institute for Market Transformation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on climate and energy.
Building energy codes—and the ability to strengthen them—are among the most powerful tools cities have to improve energy efficiency, Majersik says. But even as municipal leaders tout energy efficiency, many aren’t doing enough to ensure that their existing energy codes are followed. Cities may need to adopt stronger tactics to translate climate goals into real energy savings and ensure builders aren’t gaming the system.
In New York, a quarter of the city’s emissions come from 14,500 buildings over 25,000 square feet in size. The city earmarked $2.7 billion in its capital budget to retrofit its own buildings, and more than 1,600 municipal and public housing buildings have been upgraded. Now, the mayor wants to force privately owned buildings to meet the same strict standards with new boilers, windows and insulation. In the long term, such measures save money through lower utility bills, but getting to that point can be a battle.
The city has already had to adopt tougher tactics to make new buildings and renovations comply with its existing codes.
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