Tag Archives: History

How to invite toxic industries to your county



Maybe we should stop inviting toxic industries to Lowndes County.
We’ve been doing that with coal ash, PCBs, superfund wastewater,
used diapers in recycling, and suing local businesses while not terminating
an exclusive franchise with a company that is involved in all of that.
Not to mention Sterling Chemical.



Here in Lowndes County we have

TVA coal ash and Florida coal ash
in our landfill,
and the landfill operator spreads the coal ash on roads on the site,
which is just uphill from the Withlacoochee River.

GA EPD
fined that landfill operator $27,500 in January 2013

for accepting PCBs into that same Pecan Row Landfill.
The same landfill that accepted

196,500 gallons of wastewater from the
Seven Out Superfund site in Waycross, GA.

A landfill that is

in an aquifer recharge zone. Continue reading →

Time to call it: Carbon Crash, Solar Dawn

Another observer gets it that

green solar power is winning.
Letting a fracking deliver company turn us into “stakeholders” in a white
elephant methane pipeline would be an even huger waste after the
pipeline stopped being used in a decade or so because

sun, wind, and water power everything by then,
winning like the Internet did.

Paul Gilding wrote on his blog 19 March 2013,

Carbon Crash Solar Dawn,



I think it’s time to call it. Renewables and associated storage,
transport and digital technologies are so rapidly disrupting whole
industries’ business models they are pushing the fossil fuel
industry towards inevitable collapse.

Some of you will struggle with that statement. Most people accept
the idea that fossil fuels are all powerful — that the
industry controls governments and it will take many decades to force
them out of our economy. Fortunately, the fossil fuel industry
suffers the same delusion.

In fact, probably the main benefit of the US shale gas and oil
“revolution” is that it’s keeping the fossil fuel
industry and it’s cheer squad distracted while renewables, electric
cars and associated technologies build the momentum needed to make
their takeover unstoppable — even by the most powerful
industry in the world.

Why are the fossil fuel companies still pushing, then? Continue reading →

Moody Family Housing Environmental Assessment published

Spotted first by Michael G. Noll in the VDT yesterday,
the document promised by
Col. Ford
the previous evening.
A quick search finds nothing about the

Nelson Hill Wells,
and no mention of VSU or any of the professors there who have

expressed
concern and asked for access to the site to conduct an independent study.



USAF ANNOUNCES AN

ENVIRONMENT ASSESSMENT

In accordance with the National Environmental Policy
Act and Air Force regulations, the Air Force Civil
Engineer Center (AFCEC) has completed a Revised Draft
Environmental Assessment (EA), Finding of No
Significant Impact (FONSI), and a Finding of No
Practicable Alternative (FONPA) to evaluate the
consequences of the following stated proposed action:

The revised Proposed Action would involve the
construction of 11 housing units for senior leadership on
a 15-acre parcel on the base and 90 units on an
approximately 60-acre parcel located northwest of the
city of Valdosta, GA on Val-Del Road (the Val-Del
Parcel). This represents a reduction Continue reading →

Free speech for bloggers as journalists reaffirmed

This should have been obvious already from

the Open Government Act of 2007,
among other laws, but now a court has reaffirmed it.

Dan Levine wrote for Reuters 17 January 2014,

Blogger gets same speech protections as traditional press: U.S. court,

A blogger is entitled to the same free speech protections as a
traditional journalist and cannot be liable for defamation unless
she acted negligently, a federal appeals court ruled on Friday.

Crystal Cox lost a defamation trial in 2011 over a blog post she
wrote accusing a bankruptcy trustee and Obsidian Finance Group of
tax fraud. A lower court judge had found that Obsidian did not have
to prove that Cox acted negligently because Cox failed to submit
evidence of her status as a journalist.

But in the ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San
Francisco said Cox deserved a new trial, regardless of the fact that
she is not a traditional reporter.



“As the Supreme Court has accurately warned, a First Amendment
distinction between the institutional press and other speakers is
unworkable,” 9th Circuit Judge Andrew Hurwitz wrote for a unanimous
three-judge panel.

Here’s the actual ruling:

Obsidian Finance Group, LLC; Kevin D. Padrick v. Crystal Cox,
United States Cour tof Appeals for the Ninth Circuit,
17 January 2014, Continue reading →

Air Force has the environmental assessment for Moody Family Housing



Last night I chatted briefly with Moody’s
Col. Ford, before he spoke at the
Lake Park Chamber Annual Awards Dinner.
He said he had been able to get on the site of the proposed Moody Family
Housing about a year ago.
I mentioned the

Nelson Hill Wells
and he said they had spent a lot of time already investigating
water issues, and now the Air Force has received the environmental assessment.
Perhaps it includes the missing piece this time,
and maybe there’s a way for the public and local professors
to provide input.




Colonel Edward Ford is commander of the 23d Mission Support Group at
Moody AFB, Ga. He leads a group of more than 1,450 military and
civilian members providing support and services to a population of
28,000 active duty, retired military and family members. His group
maintains an installation with more than 830 buildings and more than
17,500 acres, including an adjacent bombing or strafing range. He is
responsible for ensuring the readiness of support forces to mobilize
and deploy to build, secure, and sustain air base operations at
austere bare base locations anywhere in the world.

The 23d Mission Support Group also retains responsibility for civil
engineering, environmental compliance, Continue reading →

Nelson Hill Wells

Seen today on

Recent clear cutting in north of Lowndes County:



In the Northwest and Southwest of the most westerly boundary line of
Nelson Hill Subdivision there are two well sites that had been
previously deeded to Lowndes County for Deep Wells for Lowndes
County Water Supply due to the problems at that time with the Well
at Stone Creek location. However the test bore water samples came
back with negative results due to surface water contamination
entering the aquifer from all the fractures in the fragile lime
stone basin and active sinkholes in that area, there is a sinkhole
less than half of a mile south from where the test bores were done
and it’s probably 90 feet deep. All this boarders the subject site
Moody Housing.

So let’s look on the west side of the
remainder of the Nelson Hill site,

parcel 0071 006B.
There are two cutouts, each about 50 feet square or 2500 square feet or 0.057 acre.
Trying to select those in the online tax assessors maps, we get:

No data found for Continue reading →

Dollar General and a historical overlay @ GLPC 2014-01-27



Yet another

Dollar General,
two

small rezonings in Lowndes County,
a

business office
in Valdosta,
and a proposed

Historical Overlay District.

Here’s the agenda, supplied by an informant.
It came as PDF of an image, so I OCRed it to get this text.
But why should any citizen have to do that?
Oh, right, “the expense”.

Greater Lowndes Planning Commission

Lowndes County City of Valdosta City of Dasher City of Hahira City of Lake Park

REGULAR MONTHLY MEETING

AGENDA

Lowndes County South Health District Administrative Office

325 West Savannah Avenue

Monday, January 27, 2014* 5:30 P.M. * Public Hearing

Continue reading →

America’s Dangerous Pipelines –Center for Biological Diversity


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 →

U.S. #58 out of 90 in broadband cost

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 →

Actually, green solar power is winning

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 →