How does $5 off your monthly electricity bill sound? Most would say good, but relatively insignificant. How about $4 billion in savings statewide and half your electricity comes from renewable energy sources? That’s a future the Clean Energy for a Healthy Arizona ballot initiative is promising all residents and businesses by 2040.

With a growing population in Arizona — 3.2 million new residents are expected to come in the next 30 years — plans are beginning to form regarding how Arizona will provide electricity to such a large number of people.

The Natural Resources Defense Council funded a study that compares two possible futures: one where Arizona Public Service and Tucson Electric Power build new gas-fired power plants, and one where almost every utility provider, except the Salt River Project, sources 50 percent of their energy from clean renewable mediums like solar and wind farms by the year 2030.

An energy firm called ICF conducted this study using their Integrated Planning Model and a few variables established by the NRDC. According to Dylan Sullivan, an senior scientist at the NRDC, the IPM is a big deal.

“IPM is a detailed model of the electric power system that is routinely used by the electricity industry and regulators, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to assess the effects of environmental regulations and policy,” Sullivan wrote in his analysis of the study.

He explained that this model is designed to consider almost every possible factor of the electricity system and the effects of its operations. Capacity of power plants, technology performance and maintenance, public demand, government policies, prices of resources, the weather — you name it. From there, it finds the most cost-effective way to meet the needs of Arizona’s growing customer base.

According to the study released in early June, when the 50 percent renewables plan is in effect, the IPM predicts the following:

• The average electricity bill would be $3 lower each month in 2030, and $5 lower each month in 2040. Combining these savings from across the state would total to more than $4 billion. That’s $4 billion going back into our economy.
  
• Arizona would meet future electricity needs with solar projects that are built and run in-state rather than using gas plants that rely on imports from other states. This will create jobs for Arizona residents.
  
• The investment in renewable energy and storage can reduce the carbon footprint. It would lower annual carbon dioxide emissions in 2030 by 4.6 million tons, which is the same as the annual emissions from 900,000 cars.
  

On November 15, 2016, I wrote my first post after the presidential election. The headline was Trump Human Rights Erosion And Termination Watch (THREAT Watch). I was afraid of what this nation would become under a Trump administration. At the same time I hoped my fears would prove to be unfounded. I wanted to find, a year or so later, that I had been an alarmist.

Based on what is going on right now at the U.S./Mexico border, the Trump administration has gone beyond the threat of eroding and ending human rights in the country. It has moved into action. We are staring directly into the abyss.

Anyone who condones or rationalizes what the administration is doing at the border to infants, toddlers, boys and girls up to the age of 18, and to parents whose children are being torn away from them, is aiding and abetting the destruction of this country as we know it. I'm sorry, but if you claim that you can retain your sense of decency and not condemn what is being done to children and families in our name, you have already lost part of what makes you a decent human being. You share the guilt with the monsters who put this zero tolerance immigration policy into motion and the border guards who are implementing it.

I have to be honest and admit, as a citizen of this country, I share the guilt and shame as well, even though I condemn what is going on with every fiber of my being.

Marea Jenness, a Tucson High School biology teacher, keeps a megaphone in the trunk of her Mercury Mariner. With the Red for Ed movement becoming a staple these days, she stays ready in the event of more protests.

Jenness is one of thousands of Southern Arizonans who support a citizen-led ballot initiative that increases tax rates on high-income earners to address underfunding in public schools.

Proponents estimate the increase would raise $690 million annually. The proposal would increase taxes on individuals who earn more than $250,000 a year and couples who earn more than $500,000.

The coalition needs 150,642 valid signatures by July 5 to place the Invest in Education Act on the November ballot, but they’re shooting for at least 200,000. David Lujan, director of The Arizona Center for Economic Progress, said the group is on track to getting the signatures they need by the deadline.

Invest in Education organizers hadn’t released a statewide count, as of this week, of how many signatures they had gathered so far. But if they can get enough signatures to put it before voters in November, they stand a decent chance of winning at the ballot box, according to a recent poll discussed at a June 6 INVESTinED news conference in Phoenix with the Children’s Action Alliance and other education advocates.

[Gulp!] OK, here goes.

I rarely find people I disagree with more fundamentally than John Huppenthal and the Koch Brothers. But sometimes the universe allows for rare moments of alignment. I'm putting these odd moments of agreement with Huppenthal and the Brothers Koch into one post even though they concern very different issues to amplify the weirdness of the moment (also to spare myself the task of doing this twice). And—this is a plus for me—I find our similar positions are at odds with people and organizations I disagree with as fundamentally as I usually disagree with Hupp and the Kochs.

First, John Huppenthal. A story on public radio station KJZZ talks about one of the major downsides of the letter grades Arizona gives to its schools, namely, schools with lower income students tend to get lower grades, which stigmatizes the students, the teachers and the schools. One of the few nearly undisputed facts in educational research is that no matter where you go, students from lower income families tend to do worse on standardized tests than students from higher income families.

Or, as John Huppenthal put it in the story,

"Here we have this letter grading system that comes in and is beating, to put it bluntly, beating the hell out of schools that are serving the most at-risk populations."

John, I couldn't have said it better myself. To be honest, you said it a hell of a lot better than I did.

Huppenthal's statement is followed by one from Lisa Graham Keegan, who thinks the grading system is not perfect but pretty good. Keegan, like Huppenthal, is an ex-Arizona lawmaker and education superintendent. She has continued to be a player in Arizona's education politics, pushing her destructive privatization/"education reform" agenda forcefully and successfully with a succession of Arizona governors and legislatures. So for a brief, happy moment, I find myself allied with Huppenthal against Keegan. (John, who is a regular commenter here, will most likely rain on my parade and explain how I'm distorting his and Keegan's positions, but I'll savor this rare moment of apparent confluence until the two of us lock horns again.)

Then there's the Charles Koch Institute, which — spoiler alert — is on the same side as I am, lined up against the Goldwater Institute. Imagine my surprise.

Revolutionary Grounds Coffee and Books, the small storefront on Fourth Avenue near the corner of Fifth Street, is closing its doors for good on Sunday, June 17. But a revival may be on the horizon.

Usually invisible to the average tourist, the store’s red brick walls housed a vibrant local community for the past decade. The place has a collection of leftist and progressive books that are sourced and sold by the owners, Joy Soler and her husband, attorney Paul Gattone.

You can find paperbacks about Marxism, sustainable food sourcing, feminist memoirs, the Civil Rights Movement and much more stacked on the shelves, adjacent to a comfy seating arrangement with faces of famous activists accenting the wooden tables.

Soler received a letter earlier this month from her landlord, Andy Fried, announcing that their rent has been increased, again. The monthly bill has risen to a point where her family can no longer afford it.

“Our landlord sent a letter saying that he had increased [the rent] back in January and we hadn’t been paying it, but he never told us he increased it back in January.” Soler said.

The letter Fried also said he will be increasing the rent again this month, and he expects back rent to be paid from January through May on top of this increased price.

“He wants us out, so he told us if we leave by the 30th he’ll forgive one month’s rent,” she said.

Soler and Gattone have spent the last decade building up their business at 606 N. Fourth Ave. She told me they have been paying on a month-to-month basis, and although Fried has been slowly raising the rent in the last couple of years, it has never been this drastic until now.

Fried, who also owns the connected buildings where Tallboys and Myztic Rootz are located, told the Weekly he increased the rent because Pima County increased the value of the property, and therefore his property tax.

Records from the Pima County Treasurer’s Office showed the property tax was $8,636 in 2017, compared to $7,856 in 2013.

Soler’s regular customers are understandably upset about this news, which she announced through the store’s Facebook page a few weeks ago. Revolutionary Grounds hosts a lot of niche community events and outreach activities that can’t be found elsewhere.

“A lot of people feel like [Revolutionary Grounds] is a safe space on the Avenue for folks who don’t have many safe spaces to go to,” she said.

Your child's learning may soon be "personalized" by a computer algorithm created by people who know more about ones and zeros than they do about human beings.

I just read another one of those stories that scare the crap out of me every time I see them. The headline on the latest article in Education Week: "How (and Why) Ed-Tech Companies Are Tracking Students' Feelings." A few hundred words into the story, you learn that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla are sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into "whole-child personalized learning." Oh, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have decided to team up with the Zuckerbergs. For all I know, Mark and Bill's wives are genuine sentient beings, but the two men are beta version androids, strong on smarts but weak on understanding of what makes humans human. They'd most likely fail the human/replicant test in Blade Runner.

Here's how the Orwellian world of computerized "personalized learning" works. A student uses, say, an online math learning program. The software keeps track of the student's every keystroke, pause, fast forward and rewind, and of course every right and wrong answer. If the program is sophisticated and invasive enough, it may record facial expressions and eye movements as well. The information is stored in an individual folder on the company server. The next time the student logs on, the software uses what it has "learned" about that child to personalize the lesson to the student's academic and emotional learning style.

Best case scenario: The lessons are better suited to individual students, increasing their levels of interest and comprehension.

Worst case scenario: As the student interacts with educational programs in a variety of subjects, and maybe plays a few games and takes a few fun quizzes ("Which do you like better, playing video games or playing sports?") as a reward for time spent or points earned, the software company amasses a growing file of psychometric data. Year by elementary school year the data accumulates, creating an intimate, multi-dimensional personality profile. Humans come and go, but computer data lives forever. During their school years, young people's data and psychometric analysis can be used to make them "better" students — more attentive and interested maybe, but also more compliant and conforming. For the rest of their lives, it can be sold to people who think they can gain monetarily, or politically, from knowing what individual buttons to push on millions of human beings to elicit the desired responses.

Big Data Is Watching You. And Evaluating You. And Manipulating You.