{"id":185,"date":"2013-01-21T13:29:48","date_gmt":"2013-01-21T18:29:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/01\/rural-aids-poverty-the-cause-solar-power-part-of-the-solution.html"},"modified":"2013-01-21T13:29:48","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T18:29:48","slug":"rural-aids-poverty-the-cause-solar-power-part-of-the-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/01\/rural-aids-poverty-the-cause-solar-power-part-of-the-solution.html","title":{"rendered":"Rural AIDS: poverty the cause, solar power part of the solution"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\n<\/a>\nDirector Lisa Biagiotti\nspent two years travelling around the South\ninterviewing people about AIDS to make a film,\ndeepsouth.<\/a>\nShe found rural AIDS is a bigger and faster-growing problem\nthan AIDS in center cities,\nyet most health and prevention funding goes to urban areas.\nThe root cause seemed clear to her: poverty.\nHere’s some deeper dirt (literally) on rural poverty in the U.S.,\nand one thing we know can help with that: distributed solar power,\nfor jobs, for reduced electrical bills, and for energy independence.\nWhat politician wouldn’t want jobs for their constituents?\n<\/p>\n

\nThe director said the screening at\n\nVSU at the end of November<\/a> drew more people than the\nday before in Little Rock.\nThere were clearly more than 150 in the audience in Valdosta.\nIt’s a topic very relevant to here, as\n\nDean Poling wrote in the VDT 26 November 2012,<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nOrganizers note that Georgia is ranked sixth highest nationally for\nits cumulative number of AIDS cases reported through December 2009.\nMore than 40,000 known HIV\/AIDS cases were reported in Georgia as of\n2010.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe South Health District’s 10 counties, which include Lowndes and\n\n<\/a>\nsurrounding counties, report 950 confirmed cases of HIV\/AIDS, while\nmany more are likely infected and risk becoming sick because they\nare not being treated. More specifically, there are about 460\nreported cases in Lowndes County.\n<\/p>\n

\nIn reporting these numbers, HIV is the virus (HIV disease) and AIDS\nis the medical diagnosis made by a doctor of the symptoms, according\nto South Health District.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nIt’s a great movie and I highly recommend it.\nDirector Biagiotti spent a substantial amount of her own money and two years to make\nthis film, yet there are aspects she could only note in passing,\nsuch as incarceration.\nShe can’t be expected to have researched every aspect;\nmaybe somebody else can step up and help follow more threads.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe movie starts with some maps about poverty and AIDS in the South.\nIt did not, however, look outside the South for poverty.\nHere are better\npoverty maps, from the CDC:\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\n<\/p>\n\n\n

\n\nThe Topography of Poverty in the United States: A Spatial Analysis Using County-Level Data From the Community Health Status Indicators Project<\/a>,\nby James B. Holt, PhD, MPA in Prev Chronic Dis 2007;4(4), October 2007.\n
\nFigure 6.<\/strong>\nLocation of counties that represent spatial clusters in which\npoverty rates are at least two standard deviations higher than the\nnational mean. These counties correspond with areas that have been\ndefined for other historical, geographic, economic, and cultural\nreasons (e.g., Appalachia, Mississippi Delta). The continental\npoverty divide is defined as the distinctive north\u2014south\ndivide across most of the United States, in which concentrations of\nlow poverty and spatial outliers of high poverty are confined to the\nnorthern half, and concentrations of high poverty and spatial\noutliers of low poverty are confined to the southern half. Data\nsource: Community Health Status Indicators (1).\n<\/p>\n

The maps in the movie left out the Rio Grande Valley, the Indian lands in the southwest,\nand Appalachia, none of which are in the historic South.\nExcept West Virginia, which seceded from Virginia, remember?\n<\/p>\n

\nWhat is common to all these areas?\nPoor rural communities that have been abandoned by urban areas.\nWho hasn’t told a hillbilly joke about Appalachia?\nHow many of us know anything about the Mississippi Delta\nexcept maybe the blues came from there?\nHolt’s Border Regions, including the Rio Grande Valley in Texas,\nis mostly populated by Hispanics, who are currently maligned\nas illegal immigrants, whether they are or not.\nAll most people know about Indian Tribal Lands is they’re\nrife with unemployment and alcoholism.\n<\/p>\n

\nBelow the maps in the movie, there’s another level: the soils.\nThe movie did not remark on that arc across\nMississippi, Alabama, and Georgia into the Carolinas.\nThat’s the Black Belt, distinctive because of its black dirt,\nwhich is why cotton was so popular there.\nDirt that originated about 75 million years ago, when the\nCretaceous period ended with a meteorite that killed a lot of\nplankton right off what was then the coastline of what would\nbecome the U.S. southeast.\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\n
\nMap found in\n\nPaleo-politics: The really long view<\/a>,\nby Will Femia, the MaddowBlog, 24 August 2012.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe same meteorite that ended the dinosaurs was the origin of the\nblack belt soils across the fall line in the southeast.\nThose soils were good for growing cotton, which was worked by slaves,\nwhose descendants became free blacks who nowadays mostly vote Democratic,\nas in this map comparing cotton growing in 1860 to presidential election\nresults in 2008:\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\nSoils also explain much of the history of the Mississippi Delta, which\nyou can clearly see in the same map above.\n<\/p>\n

\nSo far, this looks like a dirt-deep version of what deepsouth the movie\nsaid.\nExcept it doesn’t stop at political events of a few hundred years ago.\nStopping with cultural origins specific to the Southeast is too close\nto saying there’s nothing we can do because nothing has changed in hundreds of years.\n(Once again, this is not a criticism of the filmmaker, who already did something\nnobody else has done, at considerable expense to herself in time and money.)\nLooking at soils takes away that easy political explanation of poverty.\nActually, there is something we can do, and it’s also related to physical geography.\n<\/p>\n

\nSoils of different origin also explain much about the\nRio Grande Valley, which is inhabited mostly by people who\nhad nothing to do with the Old South:\nit’s a fertile river valley through a desert.\nGeography also explains Appalachia: settlers from the borderlands\nin the north of England, the south of Scotland, and the northeast of Ireland\nwent there because the mountains and valleys resembled their homelands.\nThe Indian reservations are at least partly the historic\nhomelands of certain tribes, which they liked because of the geography.\n<\/p>\n

\nPhysical geography is to some sense destiny.\nBut we can overcome it if we understand it, which requires\nlooking beyond easy historical answers.\nLet’s look at physical geography for at least one way to alleviate rural poverty.\n<\/p>\n

\nCompare this map of U.S. solar photovoltaic insolation:\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\n
\nNREL: Photovoltaic Solar Resource of the United States\n<\/p>\n

\nHm, lots of sunshine in the Black Belt, the Rio Grand Valley, and Tribal\nLands!\nNot quite as much in Appalachia, but way more than in Germany,\nthe world leader in solar power. Rural solar power can help fight rural\npoverty, the root cause of the rural HIV epidemic.\n\n<\/a>\nIt will bring jobs\n\nin transportation, installation, and research.<\/a>\nIt will reduce poor people’s electric bills, especially if combined\nwith weatherizing for energy efficiency, like\n\nHouston has been doing<\/a>, according to former Mayor Bill White:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nSo in Houston, we gave everybody in a neighborhood a one-page form\nthat said \u201cYes\u201d or \u201cNo.\u201d For everybody who\n\n<\/a>\nwanted it, a crew would come in and pressurize the house, seal the\nleaks, put or replace insulation in the attic if it was\ninsufficient, replace light bulbs with energy-efficient light bulbs,\nthose types of things. We could do one house in about 2 hours and 10\nminutes. In the neighborhoods where we did this, we brought down the\naverage utility bill for all who participated by 10 to 20 percent.\nWe scaled up, trained crews, created jobs, and had certifications\nand quality control, for a little more than $1,000 per house, versus\n! $8,000 for the traditional weatherization program. That’s the type\nof program we need throughout the country, especially in\nmiddle-class neighborhoods built from 1940 to 1970.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nGeorgia’s 1973\n\nTerritoriality Law<\/a>\nholds solar back in Georgia by\n\nmaking it hard for homeowners and businesses to finance<\/a> solar installations.\nMeanwhile,\n\nSouthern Company and Georgia Power don’t want to change that law<\/a>.\nInstead they are wasting a lot of ratepayer money in\n\nrate hikes for building new nukes<\/a>\nand\n\nnatural gas plants.<\/a>\n<\/p>\n

\nA company called Georgia Solar Utilities (GaSU) wants to build\na solar utility, and\n\nhas gotten the Georgia Public Service Commission<\/a>\nto say that’s a good idea.\nThe legislature still must approve GaSU’s plan, which would add another\nutility to the utilities already in the 1973 law.\nA solar utility, which would issue bonds to finance a few huge solar installations.\nThe advantage of such a utility is precisely that it aggregates the\nbuying power of the entire state so as to keep bond coupon rates down.\nBut that’s one way to spell “monopoly”.\nA monopoly that does nothing about jobs in the Black Belt or most of the\nrest of rural Georgia.\nGaSU says that a solar utility would drive down electrical costs for everyone.\nPerhaps so, eventually.\nAnd a few big solar plants wouldn’t hurt.\n<\/p>\n

\nBut a centralized solar utility does nothing for jobs in most poor\nrural areas.\nWe need widely distributed solar across the entire southeast\nand in the other areas of high poverty:\nfor jobs, for reduced electrical bills, and for energy independence for the\nwhole region.\nWe need to be sure any legislative fix to the 1973 law\nfor GaSU (or any other reason) also fixes it so everyone can\nreadily get financing for rooftop solar power.\nWhat legislators want to say they’re opposed to jobs for their constituents?\n<\/p>\n

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