That’s Albert in the hat bending my ear.
There was food, there was blown glass
and much other artwork, and bands.
As previously mentioned, SAVE was educating people
about the problems with biomass.
More pictures in the flickr set.
First Friday, Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 3 September 2010, Pictures and videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.
-jsq
On the right, Natasha Fast is explaining it to somebody.
First Friday, Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 3 September 2010, Pictures and videos by Gretchen Quarterman.
-jsq
Who does know?
We are mapping all of the existing, proposed, closed and defeated dirty energy and waste facilities in the United States. We are building a network of community groups to fight the facilities and the corporations behind them.The detail map shown includes the Wiregrass Power LLC proposed plant (the orange oval I just south of Valdosta), two plants in Hamilton County, Florida Continue reading
Georgia EPD approved the air quality permit for the Wiregrass Power LLC
biomass plant on Perimeter Road just outside Valdosta in Lowndes County,
with an effective date of July 19, 2010 (PDF, Word).
Somebody may want to do the exercise of comparing the approved permit
with the application to see if the process was entirely
rubberstamp or whether any changes at all were made after
the many questions
people asked at the
public hearing.
Meanwhile, is that it? Will the plant be built? Not necessarily: Continue reading
Jeffrey H. Dorfman,
Professor, Dept. of Agricultural & Applied Economics,
The University of Georgia:
Local governments must ensure balanced growth, as sprawling residential growth is a certain ticket to fiscal ruin*See The Economics of Growth, Sprawl and Land Use Decisions.
* Or at least big tax increases.
Note and jobs, not just people: jobs so the people can work and afford the houses they live in.
- Green spaces increase property values of surrounding land
- Green and open spaces can provide environmental amenities for free
- If green spaces contribute to quality of life, you attract people and jobs to community
But this doesn’t mean exurban subdivisions with big yards: Continue reading
In 2004 the state of Georgia adopted a water planning
system, and in 2008 adopted a water plan,
with regional councils appointed in 2009 by the governor,
lieutenant governor, and Speaker of the House.
While I wonder why this organizational setup inserted a regional
layer of government that is unaccountable to the people in the region,
it’s good somebody
is doing some water planning.
In the event “gaps” between available water and future (or current) demands are identified, the Council will determine which water and land use management practices should be employed to ensure there is sufficient water and assimilative capacity to meet future needs. EPD will use computer models to test the ability of the recommended practices to close any identified “gaps.”If you remember Atlanta running out of water a few years ago Continue reading
Here’s an interesting
video interview
with Dr. William Sammons,
the doctor who spoke in Traverse City just before that biomass plant was nixed.
Is it more important to reach the target … or to say we have new information and we need to revise the targets and what qualifies?He’s talking about potential billions of dollars of health costs from particulates, about “waste” wood (what they say they will burn) vs. whole trees (what they end up burning), and most importantly about sustainability.
Biomass plants don’t have to report their CO2 emissions, so if all the proposed biomass plants get built we’re talking about as much as 800 million tons of CO2 from biomass plants by 2020, 12 to 14% of total CO2 emissions for the U.S. (not just power emissions: total national emissions). Trees don’t grow fast enough to suck all that back out of the air in ten years. Continue reading
From: George Boston Rhynes
August 13, 2010
George Boston Rhynes (229-251-8645) Valdosta, Georgia 31605
TO: All Editors and Beyond
The Valdosta Daily Times Article on Aug 11 that read; “Order in the Court, a look at the Lowndes County Court House.” It highlighted the history and benefits of the old 1905 Lowndes County Court House but did not address diversity, gender, and who mostly benefited through employment from building this new facility. That is except for the employers and immigrants from Mexico. Continue reading
George Monbiot writes in the Guardian about how
We have allowed developers to rob us of our village green:
Build loose suburbs carved up by busy roads and without green spaces and you help to create a population of fat, lonely people plagued by criminals. Build dense, leafy settlements with mixed uses, protected from traffic, and you help to create safe, fit and friendly communities.
Here’s one picture of what a fit, safe and functional community might look like. There’s nothing radical or new about it: similar developments have been built for centuries (and most are now monopolised by the rich). Houses or apartment blocks are built densely around a square of shared green space. It is big enough for playing ball games, but without fixed goalposts, allowing children and adults to define the space for themselves. It could contain trees; perhaps rocks or logs to climb on. There might be a corner of uncut meadow, or flowerbeds or fruit bushes. The space will work best when it is designed and managed by the people who live there.(An asbo is an Anti-Social Behaviour Order, like a citation for disturbing the peace.)Most important, the houses face inwards, and no cars are allowed inside the square: the roads serve only the backs of the buildings. The square is overlooked by everyone, which means that children can run in and out of their houses unsupervised, create their own tribes and learn their own rules, without fear of traffic accidents or molesters. They have a place in which to run wild without collecting asbos.
Suppose instead of walling off a detention pond and letting it grow weeds and snakes we made most of it high enough not to flood and let it grow trees, flowers, grass for children to play on, and maybe even vegetables.
That wouldn’t cost much more to develop.
The detention pond pictured is in the
Hamilton Pointe development,
where several residents told me they had no place to play football
or basketball.
If the detention pond was turned into a village green, they would have a place
for sports.
-jsq
OK, let’s look at “solar” in the
online interactive map from
Joel Achenbach’s story about
The 21st Century Grid
in the July 2010 National Geographic.
It’s easy to count the proposed solar power plants in Georgia: zero.
Yet there’s one in Virginia, one in Maryland, and at least three in Florida,
adding to the
currently largest solar plant in the country near De Soto, Florida.
The map legend repeats the GEFA canard that
The Southwest is a solar-power hotbed. To supplement fossil fuel plants, long-distance transmission lines stretch from the Mojave Destert, which has plenty of sun.
Yes, that’s true, but what about this.
At least three solar plants are proposed around San Antonio and Austin,
which are not in the area of the southwest the map blurb is referring to.
In fact, the largest solar plant in the country is proposed for Austin.
Austin is one degree of latitude south of Valdosta,
and has been leading the country in solar deployment for many years now.
Texas in general
almost doubled renewable energy generation between 2004 and 2006
while Georgia did nothing.
Texas hasn’t stopped.
When will Georgia start?
The Austin solar solution doesn’t require massive new power lines, either. It’s mostly been accomplished with solar panels on houses and business roofs; panels that wouldn’t show up on National Geographic’s map because they’re small and distributed. Which is the point: they generate power where it’s needed, and at peak times when it’s needed, namely when it’s hot and sunny out and air conditioners are running on max. There’s no reason Georgia can’t do the same.
I would continue this series by showing wind generation proposed for Georgia, but there isn’t any of that, either. There could be, off the coast.
Which makes more sense: polluting our air with more coal and biomass plants, or getting a move on with solar and wind?
-jsq