Tag Archives: History

The nuclear renaissance is dead: somebody tell the Georgia legislature the wind is blowing towards the sun

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 MSA does OK in nationwide ranking

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

The five job growth components are weighted 1/7th each,
and the four high-tech components are weighted half as much,
1/14th each.
The first four scores appear to be relative to 100 for the entire U.S.
Where exactly
Milliken Institute
got their data is not clear,
especially for

these: Continue reading →

Spectra reps unfamiliar with Spectra fines @ LCC 2013-12-09

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 →

80 years ago alcohol prohibition ended: time to end drug prohibition

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 →

Buried under nine feet of manure: 19th century horse predictions

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.

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.

Continue reading →

More solar jobs already than coal, or oil and gas extraction

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 →

Why south Georgia actions start in Lowndes County and Valdosta

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 →

A complete lack of concern with our request –S.A.V.E. to VSU President McKinney

S.A.V.E. never gives up, and the VSU Foundation provided fuel for the fight. -jsq

November 13, 2013

Dr. William J. McKinney

President

Valdosta State University

Dear President McKinney,

Thank you very much for agreeing to be a part of

our ceremony for the new solar canopy this Friday. We are excited
for it, and we are glad that you will be able to come. We definitely
appreciate your support, and we hope to have a nice turnout!

As happy as we are about VSU’s continuing efforts to “go
green,” I am writing to you in regard to
S.A.V.E.’s ongoing
fossil fuel divestment campaign and

the recent response we received
from the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the VSU Foundation. If
you have not yet read the letter, I have attached a copy for your
convenience.

We were clearly disappointed to hear that

our request had been
denied, but what troubled us the most was the condescending tone
used by Mr. Edwards in the last part of his letter. To end his
letter on University (not Foundation) letterhead with sarcasm and
cavalier dismissal of our concerns is unacceptable, especially as we
have acted in a respectful manner throughout this process. Within
his response, Mr. Edwards downplays the importance of practicing
social responsibility and belittles the validity of past divestment
campaigns that have been used to counteract injustices such as

South Africa’s Apartheid regime, which represented an inhumane and
repressive system that needed to be challenged.

We also find Continue reading →

Southern Company missed earnings: weather and Kemper Coal and nuclear Plant Vogtle

SO CEO Tom Fanning continued to blame slow sales and earnings on mild
weather (air conditioners running less), but the big boondoggle
going bad is Kemper Coal, which has slipped six months from May 2014 to Q4 2014,
and even the Wall Street Journal calls it “possibly the most expensive fossil-fuel power plant ever built in the U.S”.
How bad will SO’s stock tank when SO’s even more expensive
nuclear Plant Vogtle slips even more?

Dividends can’t prop up SO’s share price forever, not when PSCs are revolting against the rate hikes
and guaranteed profit hikes that prop up those dividends.
When will Southern Company and Georgia Power get out front and lead in solar and wind power?
Before or after the public, state public service commissions, and investors make them do it?

Justin Loiseau wrote for DailyFinance 4 November 2013,

Southern Company Earnings: A $5 Billion Blunder? Continue reading →

No Runoff in Hahira: plurality will win

The Hahira rule is plurality, not 50% plus 1.

According to email to Gretchen from John Hallman with the Georgia Secretary of State,
containing a forward from Jonathan Sumner, Hahira City Manager,
originally copied to all the Hahira candidates, Mayor and Council,
and many city employees on 25 October 2013:

Subject: No Runoff after General Election

Mayor, Councilmembers, Candidates,

In response to a question submitted to our City Attorney and myself
earlier today by Supervisor of Elections Deb Cox, we have determined
that a runoff after the November general election is not allowed
under our current or even the old Charter (except in the extreme
unlikelihood of a tie). The original 1912 charter stated,

Continue reading →

On the LAKE front

Citizen dialog for transparent process by the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange