Amid a GOP assault on democracy, a few bits of good news...

A federal bankruptcy judge dismissed an effort by the National Rifle Association to declare bankruptcy on Tuesday, ruling that the gun rights group had not filed the case in good faith.

The ruling slams the door on the NRA's attempt to use bankruptcy laws to evade New York officials seeking to dissolve the organization.

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The bankruptcy trial had paused other legal challenges the NRA had been facing, but this decision returns the group to its confrontation with the New York attorney general, who is seeking to shut it down over alleged "fraud and abuse."

  NPR

The U.S. Interior Department approved the country's first large-scale offshore wind project Tuesday, a final hurdle that reverses course from the Trump administration and sets the stage for a major shift in the energy landscape.

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The $2.8 billion project, known as Vineyard Wind 1, will consist of 62 turbines spaced about a mile apart, each standing about 837 feet above the water's surface. Cables buried beneath the ocean floor will connect the power from these turbines with the New England grid onshore.

The project is expected to produce enough renewable electricity to power 400,000 Massachusetts homes every year while also saving ratepayers billions of dollars and reducing annual carbon dioxide emissions in the state by about 1.68 million metric tons.

Lars Pedersen, Vineyard Wind's CEO, recently told public radio station WBUR that he expects offshore construction to begin next year, with renewable energy flowing to the grid by the end of 2023.

  NPR

This next one is not a done deal, but it's encouraging.

It's a tough time to be a young person. COVID-19 has robbed many of them of experiences and plans. Their unemployment rate remains high. College enrollment is down.

To address those concerns and bolster preparedness for a warming world, President Biden wants to retool and relaunch one of the country's most celebrated government programs: the Civilian Conservation Corps.

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Created in 1933, in the wake of the Great Depression, the CCC put millions of young men — yes, just men — back to work. They moved from East to West, to places they'd never been before, building roads, bridges, telephone lines, campgrounds and dams — infrastructure that's still in use and, at times, maintained by smaller conservation corps crews such as Spofforth's today. The original CCC ended in 1942, disrupted by World War II.

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The original Civilian Conservation Corps employed roughly 3 million young men in its nine-year run. The corps fought wildfires and helped in disaster relief efforts after hurricanes. It built more than 100,000 miles of roads and trails, 318,000 dams and tens of thousands of bridges. It strung telephone lines across mountain passes, connecting the country.

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"Just like we need a unified national response to COVID-19, we need a unified national response to climate change," Biden said while introducing his climate team.

While his is not the first effort to bring back a federal conservation corps, Biden has put the program center stage like never before. One of his first executive orders called for the creation of a modern CCC to "mobilize the next generation of conservation and resilience workers and maximize the creation of accessible training opportunities and good jobs." His interior secretary, Deb Haaland, sponsored a bill with a similar goal while representing New Mexico in Congress

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Biden's Civilian Climate Corps, while modeled after the original CCC, would likely differ in a few significant ways.

The first: scope. Biden wants to spend $10 billion on creating his Civilian Climate Corps — a sliver of the $2 trillion proposed in his American Jobs Plan. Adjusted for inflation, that's a far cry from the money Roosevelt poured into the original CCC and less than many progressive groups have been advocating for.

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The jobs, though, would be offered to a far broader group of people. For all the nostalgia the CCC brings up among progressives, there's the reality it was racially segregated, closed off to women and paid almost nothing.

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Biden's executive order directed the Interior and Agriculture departments to submit a report laying out how a program could form under existing statutes. (The report is overdue and has not yet been released.)

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Most of the jobs would be short term, with the goal of launching corps members into environmental and outdoors-focused careers.

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Montana Conservation Corps crews are already doing some of the work envisioned in Biden's climate proposal — reducing wildfire risk and building artificial dams to help retain water higher in watersheds.

That kind of work would increase exponentially if Biden's proposal passes, said McKinney, president of the corps. But the bigger benefit might be in what it could do for America's youth.

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Biden is the most unapologetic, big-government Democratic president in decades. It's a stance supported by an array of circumstances: the enormity of the pandemic, former President Donald Trump's embrace of big spending projects and deficit-funded tax cuts, and a progressive shift within the Democratic Party.

"Well, we've been living in the shadow of Reagan's America. And now it's back to the future. We're going to start to live in the shadow of FDR," said Jonathan Alter, a journalist and historian who wrote a book about Roosevelt's famed first 100 days.

  NPR