Tag Archives: Water

The backfire effect, and how to leapfrog it

If you have evidence against something that will harm public health or waste money, just tell everybody and they’ll understand and stop it, right? Nope, humans don’t work that way. More likely you’ll provoke the backfire effect, reinforcing beliefs in the bad information that caused the problem in the first place. Here are some ways to jump over that effect to get at solutions to the problem.

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:

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.

Countering bad information directly just reinforces it.

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 →

Americans overwhelmingly want clean energy and environmental protection —Pew

Climate Progress points out that a new Pew poll, “Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology”, shows that Public support for alternative energy transcends political barriers:
71% of Americans believe “This country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment.” And 59% believe that “strongly.”
Quoting from Pew’s summary:
In light of this diversity it is interesting to note a couple of areas where almost all of these groups agree. The first is on support for alternative energy. Overall, the public prioritizes developing alternative energy over expanding oil, coal, and natural gas by a 63-29 margin. And, as shown in the chart below, seven of Pew’s eight active typology groups support this position, including a whopping 40-point margin among the Main Street Republican group. Only the staunch conservatives (9 percent of the public) dissent from the rest. Conservatives usually act like progressive ideas have no purchase in “their” part of the political spectrum. These data suggest otherwise.
And no, conservatives are not the political type the south has the most disproportional percentage of: those would be Hard-Pressed Democrats and Disaffecteds.

And no, by “alternative energy” people don’t mean polluting biomass: 63% of Americans say “EPA needs to do more to hold polluters accountable and protect the air and water”. What Americans want is clean renewable energy: solar, wind, and hydrogen.

-jsq

Privatizing water —GA SB 122

Privatizing prisons is not enough; now Georgia wants to privatize water.

Aaron Gould Sheinin wrote in the AJC Monday 2 May 2011, Deal signs bill allowing public-private reservoirs

Partnerships between public authorities and private enterprise to build new reservoirs are now legal in Georgia under legislation Gov. Nathan Deal signed into law Monday.

Senate Bill 122 “is particularly useful at times such as these when budget cutbacks hinder our ability to invest in new infrastructure,” Deal said at a Georgia Chamber of Commerce luncheon in his honor. “This stretches public dollars by attracting partners to move forward with public works projects that will benefit the citizens of the state for generations.”

Lawmakers approved $46 million in bond money in the state budget that takes effect July 1 to help facilitate the construction of new reservoirs. Deal said he hopes to increase that to $300 million over the next several years.

“Increasing our water supply in terms of holding that supply is critical for meeting our future needs,” Deal said.

Yes, but trumping up a fake budget crisis by giving tax breaks to people who don’t need them and then using it to privatize public infrastructure for corporate profit at taxpayer expense is not the way to do it.

Wait, it gets even better: Continue reading →

LCC 5:30 PM Tuesday 26 April 2011

Even a light agenda includes a water item.

It’s a very light agenda for the Lowndes County Commission; so light the work session was cancelled. However, the regular session is scheduled as usual for Tuesday evening.

They’ve moved Citizens Wishing to be Heard back to the middle of the meeting. Historically, it’s been here and it’s been there in different places in the agenda. I still think at the end is a fine place for it, since then more people may stay for the entire meeting. I posted my other thoughts on CWTBH back when they changed to their current policy on that.

Groundwater sampling near a landfill is an item. The same item was on the agenda last time, but didn’t get resolved. Water is an issue throughout the region.

LOWNDES COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS
PROPOSED AGENDA
WORK SESSION CANCELLED
REGULAR SESSION, TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2011, 5:30 p.m.
327 N. Ashley Street — 2nd Floor
Continue reading →

Runaround —Leigh Touchton

Leigh Touchton responded to Valdosta Mayor John Fretti’s response to her previous post. -jsq
Happy Birthday, Mayor Fretti, and thank you for posting publicly.

However, I wish you would stop trying to pass Mayor and Council’s portion of responsibility for the biomass incinerator to the Industrial Authority. I delivered a letter to Mayor and Council Thursday night outlining 10 reasons your Utilities Director can legitimately give when he (hopefully) follows Mayor and Council’s recommendation to refuse to sell gray water to the proposed biomass incinerator. I and many other citizens are tired of the run-around and the shifting of responsibility for this “biomess” from one public official or group to another.

A councilmember told me that Council would never vote

Continue reading →

Energy reliability: let’s do the study for Georgia

Which energy source is really more reliable? Nuclear, coal, or wind, water, and sun?

As Plant Vogtle and others have just demonstrated, nuclear power isn’t as reliable as we might have thought. Mark Z. Jacobson says we can generate reliable power from wind, water, and sunlight alone. Will that work in Georgia?

Elsevier’s policy of charging for peer-reviewed articles from scientific journals is controversial, and some people find $19.95 prohibitive to access Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi’s Providing all global energy with wind, water, and solar power, Part I: Technologies, energy resources, quantities and areas of infrastructure, and materials from Energy Policy Volume 39, Issue 3, March 2011, Pages 1154-1169. Fortunately, the same authors wrote an earlier version for Scientific American, 26 October 2009, A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables: Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world’s energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. Here’s how

A new infrastructure must provide energy on demand at least as reliably as the existing infrastructure. WWS technologies generally suffer less downtime than traditional sources. The average U.S. coal plant is offline 12.5 percent of the year for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. Modern wind turbines have a down time of less than 2 percent on land and less than 5 percent at sea. Photovoltaic systems are also at less than 2 percent. Moreover, when an individual wind, solar or wave device is down, only a small fraction of production is affected; when a coal, nuclear or natural gas plant goes offline, a large chunk of generation is lost.
Continue reading →

Disturbing things —Dr. Noll

Dr. Noll posted a comment today about last night’s Valdosta City Council meeting, and we thank him for his report:
What I found most disturbing are actually the following things that happened at last night’s meeting:
  1. A Mayor in absentia because he is celebrating his birthday and decided not to attend because of a lack of agenda items for the meeting.
  2. A mother being harassed by Mr. Taylor who makes sexist comments when her daughter is receiving an award for an essay contest.
  3. A City Council and ALL of its members who continue to hide behind a policy that supposedly does not allow them to respond during meetings. As if they would respond before or after meetings.
  4. City Council member Yost going into a tirade about my wife’s comment in regard to “boring” meetings, when she is referring to the experience of our children who have been sitting through quite a few of them by now. Such meetings are indeed “boring” to a 9 and 12 year old.
  5. Council member Yost then goes on to “thank” all of us for staying until the end of the meeting so that we could witness the important work they do. Like what? The replacement of two belt press sludge pumps, the renaming of a street? If there is an important piece of work Mr. Yost and his colleagues could impress us with, it would be a resolution to not sell water to a biomass plant that threatens the health of our community!
-Michael Noll
Sometimes sludge replacement parts are boring, but if we don’t replace them and the wastewater treatment plant overflows, it may pollute your yard or your creek. Best we take of it ahead of time and be proactive, rather than reactive. Let’s take care of a problem before it happens!

-gretchen

PS: Don’t forget to go to the Planning Commission on Monday.

Conversation for jobs —Cristobal Serran-Pagan @ VCC 7 April 2011

Dr. Serran-Pagan suggests we have a conversation among all types of people and do the math. Let’s put the money where it will produce jobs. Solar, wind, why haven’t we been doing it? Real clean renewable sources of energy. He brings up the water the biomass plant would use.
Water is precious. Air is precious. Oil, coal, is not precious. Biomass is not precious. We have plenty of good clean, renewable sources of energy. Let’s do that…. and get rid of old models, and let’s try to do what is right for community, for our economy, and for public interest.

Here’s the video:


Conversation for jobs —Cristobal Serran-Pagan @ VCC 7 April 2011
Regular monthly meeting of the Valdosta City Council (VCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 7 April 2011,
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

-jsq

Nuclear (Stewart Brand) vs. renewable energy (Mark Z. Jacobson) at TED

Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame is a long-time environmentalist who in recent years decided nuclear was necessary. (He also decided no-till was necessary, which was enough to convince me he’s gone barmy.) Here at TED he debates Mark Z. Jacobson, whose new study says we can power the world with wind, water, and sun. I think Jacobson should reconsider including building more hydroelectric dams, but his study does demonstrate that we don’t need nuclear or biomass. But watch it and see what you think:

Here is my critique of Brand’s arguments: Continue reading →