Coal continues losing at life, this time in Mississippi where environmental and civil rights activists have forced utility giant Southern Company to significantly scale back its plans for expanding fossil-fuel energy plant production across the Delta region. Advocates from the Sierra Club have negotiated a remarkable deal on behalf of residents who’ve lived too long with coal pollution. Southern has agreed to:

cease coal burning operations at two of its Mississippi locations by next March;
end its opposition to net-metering policies so that residents and businesses can more easily access solar power;
invest $15 million into energy efficiency programs for low-income communities;
strengthen flood protections for water retention ponds near the coal mines that feed the plants to prevent toxic pollution from contaminating groundwater and local waterways;
provide $2 million to protect habitat for the critically endangered Mississippi gopher frog (the preserve will be named for Gulf Coast activist Linda St. Martin who passed away in May);
and minimize mining operation impacts on local traffic.

This is a big freaking deal not only for the residents, but for the environmental justice coalition that forged this treaty. The NAACP’s climate justice director, Jacqui Patterson, explains:

They said it couldn’t be done. In a state […]

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Talk to anyone in Silicon Valley these days, and it’s hard to go more than two minutes without hearing about ‘disruption.” Uber is disrupting the taxi business. Airbnb is disrupting the hotel business. Apple’s iTunes disrupted the music industry, but now risks being disrupted by Spotify. Listen long enough, and it’s hard not to conclude that existing companies, no matter how big and powerful, are all but doomed, marking time until their inevitable overthrow by hoodie-wearing innovators.

In fact, the opposite is true. By a wide range of measures, the advantages of incumbency in corporate America have never been greater. ‘The business sector of the United States,” economists Ian Hathaway and Robert Litan wrote in a recent Brookings Institution paper, ‘appears to be getting ‘old and fat.’”1

Hathaway and Litan say the trend is worrisome, and other economists who have studied the issue agree. Entrepreneurship is a critical source of jobs in the economy. Perhaps even more importantly, it is a major driver of productivity growth. New companies, after all, often arise from an idea about how to do something better, whether it’s making cars or brewing coffee. Many of those ideas fail to pan out, but the ones that work can […]

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KENNETT SQUARE, Pa. — The cheerful sign outside Jane Cornell’s summer school classroom in Pennsylvania’s wealthiest county says “Welcome” and “Bienvenidos” in polished handwriting.

Inside, giggling grade-schoolers who mostly come from homes where Spanish is the primary language worked on storytelling with a tale about a crocodile going to the dentist. The children and their classroom at the Mary D. Lang Kindergarten Center, near both mushroom farms and the borough’s bucolic red-brick downtown, are a subtle reminder of America’s changing school demographics.

For the first time ever, U.S. public schools are projected this fall to have more minority students than non-Hispanic whites enrolled, a shift largely fueled by growth in the number of Hispanic children.

Non-Hispanic white students are still expected to be the largest racial group in the public schools this year at 49.8 percent. But the National Center for Education Statistics says minority students, when added together, will now make up the majority.

About one-quarter of the minority students are Hispanic, 15 percent are black and 5 percent are Asian and Pacific Islanders. Biracial students and Native Americans make up a smaller share of the minority student population.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the changing population a seminal moment in education. “We can’t […]

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GUTHRIE, OKLAHOMA — Inside the small U-Haul rental office in Guthrie, Oklahoma, Tami Boxley routinely deals with something that once was rare: the rattling, booming roll of the earth.

In the last week alone, residents of Guthrie, pop. 10,191, have felt five quakes rock the town a half hour’s drive from Oklahoma City.

The most recent rippled through Friday after lunchtime, duly recorded on the “QuakeWatch” application many residents have loaded onto their smartphones. The local newspaper runs a weekly column updating details of the latest quakes.

“It feels like the earth is opening up and you are falling,” said Boxley. “It’s scary.”

Since January, Oklahoma has had 292 earthquakes that register a magnitude 3.0 or larger, more than any other state in the continental United States. That’s nearly triple the 109 last year. Through 2008, Oklahoma averaged less than two a year.[http://link.reuters.com/vyg62w]

The unprecedented earthquake activity has put Oklahoma in the center of an emerging debate over whether the disposal of wastewater from oil and gas production triggers earthquakes. It has prompted enactment of broad new rules that go into effect Sept. 12.

“The houses are bouncing. It is frightening,” said Matt Skinner, spokesman for the Oklahoma Corporations Commission, which regulates oil and gas work […]

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A Minnesota farm is helping people power their homes and businesses with solar energy without having to put panels on their roof.

Eichten’s Cheese Farm in Chisago County is about to become one of Minnesota’s biggest community solar gardens.

For several decades, the Eichten’s family farm has prided itself on one rich Minnesota product.

“I guess over 30 years I’ve been making cheese,” said owner Ed Eichten.

But along with the cream, recently the farm began churning out something greener.

“Our electricity bill always kind of shocked us every month, so we were trying to think of a way we could cut electricity costs,” he said.

Two years ago, Eichten had 160 solar panels installed behind his house.The panels turn sunlight into electricity, which is converted on his farm and piped straight into his factory.

Part of making cheese is having really good refrigeration. Eichten says his 13 compressors and coolers comprise most of his energy usage. His solar panels are taking some of the weight.

“They’re helping immensely [to] take the bite out of the electricity bill for cooling all this stuff,” he said.

The panels produce one third of Eichten’s energy, saving him about $500 a month.

Now his land could help others reap the same rewards. With […]

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