7,978 fatalities by in 2013 – 4,199 by 2001 = 3,779, which is more than the 2,977 killed by the hijackers on 9/11. If the fossil fuel industry was a foreign country, we would have invaded it by now. Why should we let that industry invade our lands for their profit? Let’s not permit a fossil fuel disaster here.
Center for Biological Diversity wrote on YouTube 31 July 2013 America’s Dangerous Pipelines: Continue reading
Stacey Higginbotham wrote for GigaOm 16 January 2014, Two charts that show how crappy U.S. broadband is,
Despite the deployments of a few gigabit networks by Google and the spread of faster cable technology, U.S. broadband is falling behind. It’s expensive both as a monthly bill and on a per-megabit basis when compared to the rest of the world. For example, at $89 per month on average, U.S. residents pay more for broadband than residents in 57 other countries including Canada, Bulgaria, Colombia and the U.K. That’s right, the U.S. ranks 58 out of 90 countries.
The research, from research firm Point Topic concludes that the higher broadband prices are “caused by lower investment in infrastructure as well as lower take-up which prevents them from benefiting from economies of scale.” To get the above data the firm compared the prices paid for residential broadband and includes standalone and bundled services offered over DSL, fiber and cable broadband in the fourth quarter of 2013.
Per-country comparisons like this are hard to act on, but even at the country level we know Continue reading
An article that dismisses without investigation the fastest growing industry in the world, solar power, after solar has become cheaper than any other energy source, is not a serious article.
Richard Smith wrote for Truthout 9 January 2014,
Green Capitalism: The God That Failed.
Sure,
there are lots of good points in there (such as we need a carbon tax,
but it’s not enough), but given that
only 90 companies account for 2/3 of GHG emissions
saying we can’t change that without crashing the world’s economy is
like saying we can’t deal with horse manure in cities in 1900 without
crashing the world’s economy, and
people did say things like that back then.
Most of the world’s oil and gas is used to produce power, so once we convert to solar and wind, we’ll have plenty of remaining petroleum for other uses such as lubrication.
Saying in 2014 that solar and wind can’t power the world is like
saying in 1994 that Continue reading
Sombody should tell Georgia Power and Southern Company
they’re still pushing a dead power source.
It’s time to go from far-too-expensive nuclear directly
to solar onshore and wind offshore.
Remember in the last year or so five U.S. nukes have been shut down and five more have been cancelled while in Canada two more have been cancelled, plus maybe two more, and maybe as many as six are to be shut down. Dr Jim Green wrote for Ecologist yesterday, The nuclear renaissance is stone cold dead,
Perhaps the most shocking developments have been in the United States, where the industry is finding it increasingly difficult to profitably operate existing reactors—especially ageing reactors requiring refurbishments—let alone build new ones.
Almost half of the world’s reactors Continue reading
Valdosta #51 of 379!
Closest MSAs as green on
the map are Auburn-Opelika #37,
Atlanta #41, Charleston #11, and
Nashville, TN at #14.
Highest weighted components are for growth in jobs, wages, and salaries, so apparently there has been some improvement in those areas. Here are the rank components from the PDF report, plus the corresponding scores from www.best-cities.org:
| Rank | Job Growth | Wage Growth | Short-Term Job Growth |
High-Tech GDP Growth |
High-Tech GDP LQ |
Number of High-Tech Industries |
|||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Change | 2012 | 2013 | 2007-12 | 2011-12 | 2006-11 | 2010-11 | 7/2012- 7/2013 | 2007-12 | 2011-12 | 2012 | with LQ≥1 2012 |
| 50 | 101 | 51 | 128 | 33 | 73 | 133 | 84 | 15 | 4 | 76 | 13 |
| Score | 97.36 | 100.68 | 102.32 | 97.65 | 109.89% | 129.20 | 119.63 | 0.56 | 6.0 | ||
Both of Spectra’s principal representatives to the Lowndes County Commission
and the Dougherty County Commission claim not to be familiar
with Spectra’s well-known public record of safety violations,
and some of what they say contradicts the public record,
so how can we believe any of their safety assertions about
Spectra’s proposed Sabal Trail Transmission pipeline?
Update 3PM: more evidence from Pennsylvania and elsewhere.
As I’ve mentioned before, Spectra’s Andrea Grover told us that everyone in Pennsylvania was happy now, after I asked her about the Steckman Ridge compressor station leak in front of reporter Matthew Woody, at the 16 October 2013 Spectra meeting at Wiregrass Tech in Valdosta. There’s more beyond the article about pipeline fines and incidents Woody wrote 24 November 2013 for the Valdosta Daily Times (VDT), the local newspaper of record.
Her excuse for the compressor leak, if I recall correctly, was that Continue reading
The twenty-first amendment to the U.S. Constitution
was ratified eighty years ago today, repealing the eighteenth amendment,
ending alcohol prohibition, and along with it the alcohol mobs
it had bred.
It’s time to do the same with drug prohibition,
and along with it not only drug gangs
but also
the epidemic of incarceration in this country.
Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her newspaper column My Day, 14 July 1939, Prohibition, Continue reading
There is a big difference between the 19th century horse excrement
crisis and the current 21st century energy crisis,
similar as they may sound.
One was real.
The other is manufactured by the modern equivalent of stagecoach vendors.
Stephen Davies wrote for The Freeman 1 September 2004, The Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894,
In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York. It was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their output.
Continue reading
The problem did indeed seem intractable. The larger and richer that cities became, the more horses they needed to function. The more horses, the more manure. Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles. It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.
Want jobs? Invest in solar power.
There are more people in the U.S. employed in the solar energy marketplace than mining coal. The banal argument that transitioning to a clean energy economy will cost us jobs is simply false. Solar is growing more than 10 times faster than the American economy.
Solar already employs more than coal, and that gap is widening. In 2012, solar added 14,000 new jobs, up 36 percent from 2010 and the industry will add another 20,000 jobs this year. The fossil fuels industry cut 4,000 jobs last year. So when it comes to employing Americans, solar is winning.
That 119,000 jobs in the solar industry is also more than the 106,400 “production and nonsupervisory employees” in the oil and gas extraction industry, and gaining rapidly Continue reading
The biggest population center for 80 miles around is Valdosta and Lowndes County.
Albany to the northwest actually has more people than Valdosta, but Dougherty County
has fewer than Lowndes County.
Beyond Albany it’s Columbus and then Auburn is about the same size as Valdosta.
Farther north it’s Warner Robins and Macon. Due west Dothan it’s Dothan. The closest bigger place is Tallahassee and Leon County, Florida to the southwest. Farther south it’s Gainesville, then Orlando and Tampa. East it’s Savannah, and of course Jacksonville.
On this handy interactive google population comparison chart, you can see in the 3-6,000 range: Adel, Ashburn, and Lakeland.
14-20,000: Americus, Brunswick, Moultrie, Thomasville, Tifton, and Waycross.
55-60,000: Auburn and Valdosta.
67-80,000: Continue reading