Chairman Jerry Jennett reported that VLCIA was generally operating
at a slower pace due to the economy.
Roy Copeland asked for the board to come back to the operating budget
later in the meeting when they could ask their CPA a few questions.
He was out of town, so they agreed to try to get him on the telephone later.
Here’s Part 1 of 2: Continue reading
David Gutierrez wrote in Natural News 10 November 2008, Prescription Drugs Kill 300 Percent More Americans than Illegal Drugs
A report by the Florida Medical Examiners Commission has concluded that prescription drugs have outstripped illegal drugs as a cause of death.
An analysis of 168,900 autopsies conducted in Florida in 2007 found that three times as many people were killed by legal drugs as by cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines put together. According to state law enforcement officials, this is a sign of a burgeoning prescription drug abuse problem.
Is this just in Florida? Continue reading
Why? Because leading medical associations have identified woody biomass incineration as increasing risks of “a variety of illnesses, some life-threatening”, because biomass incineration produces more CO2, NOX, and fine particulates than existing coal plants, and because it “may lead to unsustainable forestry practices and a net increase in global greenhouse gas emissions”.
Who proposed this? Continue reading
After he talked about
expanding the Wiregrass Solar plant by another megawatt,
Alden Hathaway of Sterling Planet said this:
Solar power is the peoples power.And to development in south Georgia, for that matter. So we can leapfrog that barrier with solar.Whether you’re talking about grid tied power here in America tied to the wire, or solar in the rural countryside of Uganda, it’s immediately available and accessible in all sizes. So I can use it to power a cell phone, charge a laptop, put light in a school, or pump water in a hospital. Solar is immediately available to do that, without massive which is a barrier to development in much of the developing world.
Here’s the video:
Solar power is the peoples power –Alden Hathaway
Commissioning Ceremony,
Wiregrass Solar, Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority (VLCIA),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 12 May 2011.
Videos by John S. Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
-jsq
Industrial Authority board meetings have turned into sidewalk cultural events. This was outside the 17 May 2011 meeting.
A couple of different signs:
Susan Wehling with her traffic signal stop biomass sign,
and a Honk for Clean Air sign.
-jsq
Continue readingGreat article John. Thanks for turning me onto the research presented here, I’ll be looking into and using it. I’d also suggest a book called “Breakthrough: from the death of environmentalism to the politics of possibility”. I think you will love it.
Beyond changing the messaging on signs, which I think is a great idea, I think what the research reflects is a fundamental change in the approach to the work.
A key to community organizing work, as opposed to activism,
Skipping in to the Industrial Authority office to file an open records request,
I noticed all five board members in the board room having a meeting.
So I asked whether an appointed board was bound by the same state law
as for an elected body that it had to announce meetings in advance.
Lu Williams said that it was a special called meeting,
that they sent a notice to the VDT, and yes, they were bound by
the same rule.
I asked if I could have a copy of the agenda of the meeting in progress. She said they had all the copies in there but she would get me one later.
A few minutes later I went back and asked if they were in executive session. She said yes, they already went from the open called meeting into executive session to discussion personnel.
However, I did pick up a copy of tonight’s agenda, and typed it in, so, for apparently the first time ever, here is the agenda for a VLCIA board meeting on the web before the meeting. -jsq
Continue readingValdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority
Agenda
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 5:30 p.m.
Industrial Authority Conference Room
2110 N. Patterson Street
And this is just the start of what’s going to happen to Georgia as long as that law is in effect.Legendary rock guitarist Carlos Santana, in town to be honored for a “Beacon of Change” award at Sunday’s MLB Civil Rights Game at Turner Field, called the state’s new immigration law “anti-American.”
Santana took his turn at the podium on the field in a pre-game ceremony before the Braves-Phillies game to criticize the immigration bill just signed into law by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal Friday.
“I represent the human race,” the Mexican-born Carlos Santana said. “The people of Arizona, the people of Atlanta, Georgia, you should be ashamed of yourselves.”
The Georgia immigration law, HB 87, cracks down on illegal immigration by increasing enforcement powers and requiring many employers to check the immigration status of new hires.
But what do you really think, Carlos? Continue reading
Alden Hathaway of Sterling Planet said he hopes to expand the Wiregrass
Solar array in Valdosta to an additional megawatt, taking it from being
one of the largest in Georgia to one of the largest in the southeast.
This is the man
Sterling Planet Chairman Sonny Murphy singled out for praise.
This is the expansion project
Sonny Murphy promoted in the Sterling Planet press release.
Alden Hathaway knows what needs to be done, and
Pete Marte and Hannah Solar stand ready to do it.
Alden Hathaway also talked about how solar helps load distribution on the electric grid, lowering electric rates for everybody. He remarked that once power companies realized that, they’d be for solar. More on that later.
But meanwhile, let’s ask Mayor Fretti and Commissioner Crawford Powell when they’re going to do this: Continue reading
Shankar Vedantam wrote in the Washington Post 15 Sep 2008 about The Power of Political Misinformation, illustrating with a couple of well-known examples of misinformation (you’ll recognize them), and continuing:
Countering bad information directly just reinforces it.Nearly all these efforts rest on the assumption that good information is the antidote to misinformation.
But a series of new experiments show that misinformation can exercise a ghostly influence on people’s minds after it has been debunked — even among people who recognize it as misinformation.
Chris Mooney wrote more about why that is in Mother Jones 18 April 2011, The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science: Continue reading