Nuclear power is a gamble we don’t need to take. Studies show that the
UK can meet its energy needs and tackle climate change without resorting
to nuclear power or burning fossil fuels – all that is lacking is the
political will.
And the U.K. is way north of Georgia.
Georgia gets a lot more sunlight and has plenty of wind off the coast.
All that is lacking here, too, is the political will.
If Atlanta won’t lead, why not Valdosta and Lowndes County?
Hotels are hiring desk clerks and housekeepers in anticipation of a spring
tourist boom in Savannah, while even a rural Georgia city devastated by
manufacturing losses is putting some people back to work as construction
begins on a $57 million private prison.
Erin Hurley provided the very model of how to give a speech:
I’m the president of
Students Against Violating the Environment at VSU.
I’m here representing
200+ members of SAVE, that consists of students, faculty, community members.
We are deeply concerned with environmental issues and
we are networking together to make this city a more humane and
sustainable community
for future generations.
As a student, I feel I have the right to be able to breathe clean air
at the college I attend.
With this biomass plant possibly being built here,
the future for generations to come are in jeopardy, and we want to protect our fellow and future students’ health.
Please take into consideration the future health of this university
and its community,
and don’t sell grey water to the proposed biomass plant.
Erin Hurley, President of
SAVE, Students Against Violating the Environment, speaking at
Regular meeting of the Valdosta City Council, 24 March 2011,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
She said who she was, who she represented, how many, what they were for, what they wanted, quickly enough that attention didn’t waver, slowly and loudly enough to be heard, and briefly enough to transcribe, with pathos, logic, and politic. Even the mayor looked up at “As a student….”
The Scottish Government has released a
plan for offshore wind
that
highlights six areas for potential development. The original plan
had selected ten regions for offshore renewable energy, however, four
were ultimately abandoned due to predicted negative environmental and
economic impact.
The six sites still in the running have an estimated energy potential of
nearly five gigawatts by 2020, or enough to power 3 million homes. Richard
Lochhead, Rural Affairs and Environment Secretary, said that Scotland’s
commitment to offshore wind production could generate over $11 billion
for the country’s economy and support up to 28,000 jobs over the next
ten years.
In mid-2009, there were 2.34 million households in Scotland
That’s right, they’re talking eight 1.28 times as much power as all
of Scotland’s homes could use.
I would guess this means they plan to export some of that power,
perhaps to England.
It seems renewable energy planning has spread beyond
the Highlands
to the rest of Scotland.
-jsq
Update 6:45 PM 3 Apr 2011: Fixed total household number; thanks to Malcom Smith for catching this typo.
The center “will educate a person to work in an advanced manufacturing
plant,” Gilley says, just the kind of plants that are coming to Troup
County over the next year or so. Using industry-standard equipment,
students will be educated to meet the manufacturing community’s
workforce needs.
In fact, the manufacturing community already is calling on the
center. DaeLim, a supplier to Kia and Hyundai (the latter has a plant
nearby in Alabama), expressed interest in students doing prototyping of
plastic parts once the center, which opened June 1, is up and running.
“We’ve left a good platform on which to build. We have good faculty,
good staff. I think we have good community relations,” Gilley says of
his time at West Georgia. Then he looks to the future and what he’ll
miss most about his job. “We offer programs that allow people to get
better paying jobs. I’ll miss having the power to make decisions that
change people’s lives.”
Hm, so the locals think the technical college has more to do with
industry than the K-12 schools.
It seemed like a good idea at the time when the west Texas farming
town of Littlefield borrowed $10 million and built the Bill Clayton
Detention Center in a cotton field south of town in 2000. The charmless
steel-and-cement-block buildings ringed with razor wire would provide
jobs to keep young people from moving to Lubbock or Dallas.
For eight years, the prison was a good employer. Idaho and Wyoming paid
for prisoners to serve time there. But two years ago, Idaho pulled out
all of its contract inmates because of a budget crunch at home. There
was also a scandal surrounding the suicide of an inmate.
Shortly afterward, the for-profit operator, GEO Group, gave notice that
it was leaving, too. One hundred prison jobs disappeared. The facility
has been empty ever since.
Such publicly owned networks can offer services that incumbents don’t,
such as the 1Gbps fiber network in Chattanooga, Tennessee, run by the
government-owned electric power board. And they sometimes have more
incentive to reach every resident, even in surrounding rural areas,
in ways that might not make sense for a profit-focused company.
According to this map of
Community Broadband Networks
by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance,
quite a few small cities in south Georgia have municipal cable networks:
A small example of following up on citizen suggestions,
but who knows? maybe it’s a sign of much more to come.
In the comments by council members at the end of the 24 March 2011
Valdosta City Council session, member Tim Carroll thanked
George Rhynes for his suggestion to put district numbers
on council members’ name plates so citizens could more easily
tell which was their council member.
Caroll raised his plate up so everyone could see
it has a number on it, too, now.
Other Council members also commented on various things.
Regular meeting of the Valdosta City Council, 24 March 2011,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
It’s an opportunity for those of us who are not currently
searching for our next meal to help those who need jobs,
and thereby to help ourselves, so they don’t turn to crime.
Like a burned-over longleaf pine, we can come back from this recession
greener than ever, if we choose wisely.
Switchgrass seemed like a good idea five or ten years ago,
but there is still no market for it.
Not just strictly organic by Georgia’s ridiculously
restrictive standards for that, but also less pesticides
for healthier foods, pioneered as nearby as Tifton.
That’s two markets: one for farmers, stores, and farmers’ markets
in growing and distributing healthy food, and one for local
banks in financing farmers converting from their overlarge
pesticide spraying machinery to plows and cultivators.
Similarly, biomass may have seemed like a good idea years ago,
but with Adage backing out of both of its Florida biomass plants
just across the state line, having never built any such plant ever,
the biomass boom never happened.
Meanwhile, our own Wesley Langdale has demonstrated to the state
that
Here’s
an interview with Mayor Drew Ferguson IV of West Point, Georgia
by Larry Copeland in USA TODAY, 25 March 2010,
Kia breathes life into old Georgia textile mill town.
Nope, no mention of schools, education, or unification.
Nice picture of the mayor with a Kia, though.
Karen Kennedy published
a lengthy article about the Kia plant
in GeorgiaTrend in August 2008,
LaGrange/Troupe County: The Kia Effect,
in which the first mention of schools is for the period after
the Kia plant opened:
The biggest need Mayor Ferg-uson sees in West Point right now is public
education. “We have a wonderful elementary school.” But there is
no middle or high school in the city limits. “The current formula for
education funding is not working,” he says of the state’s approach,
which bases money on students who are already in the system, not on
students who will be coming through the system in the near future. “If
you don’t have great education opportunities people will live far away
and drive [to work]. Schools should be looked at as an economic driver.”
They are a way to help recruit good strong families to an area, he adds.
That’s right, after the Kia plant, there are big problems
with the schools, and there’s not even any mention of unification.
Nuclear power is a gamble we don’t need to take. Studies show that the UK can meet its energy needs and tackle climate change without resorting to nuclear power or burning fossil fuels – all that is lacking is the political will.
It’s an opportunity for those of us who are not currently
searching for our next meal to help those who need jobs,
and thereby to help ourselves, so they don’t turn to crime.
Like a burned-over longleaf pine, we can come back from this recession
greener than ever, if we choose wisely.
