On the LAKE Front

Valdostans protest biomass --VSU Spectator

Molly Duet writes in the VSU newspaper today:

Protestors wearing respirator masks held signs reading "Biomass? No!" in front of the Valdosta City Hall building on Thursday. Members of the Wiregrass Activists for Clean Energy, the VSU student organization Students Against Violating the Environment, and other concerned Valdosta citizens showed up to protest the construction of the Wiregrass Power: Biomass Electric Generating Plant.

"We already have solar power resources in place that we could be using and I feel like money should be directed towards that," Ivey Roubique, vice-president of the Student Geological Society, said. "It wouldn’t be good for the community and even though I’m in college here it still matters."

The Spectator article quotes from two speakers for whom LAKE happens to have video, linked below.

Why? There's speculation about money -- Stewart Emmett (?) @ VCC 24 March 2011

When public officials ignore objections for long enough, eventually people start speculating as to their motives, in this case about the proposed biomass plant. Here's the video:

Regular meeting of the Valdosta City Council, 24 February 2011.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

-jsq

Solar and wind: All that is lacking is the political will

Mike Childs wrote in the Guardian on 27 March 2011, Our green energy potential is huge, but gets little support: The crisis at Fukushima calls into question our nuclear power policy

Nuclear power is a gamble we don't need to take. Studies show that the UK can meet its energy needs and tackle climate change without resorting to nuclear power or burning fossil fuels – all that is lacking is the political will.

Studies like this one for Scotland and this one for the whole world.

And the U.K. is way north of Georgia. Georgia gets a lot more sunlight and has plenty of wind off the coast. All that is lacking here, too, is the political will.

If Atlanta won't lead, why not Valdosta and Lowndes County?

-jsq

Georgia press complicit in promoting private prisons

The Augusta Chronicle puts it in the lede for the whole state, Georgia showing signs of recovery: Tax numbers give reasons for hope, Associated Press, Monday, March 14, 2011:

Hotels are hiring desk clerks and housekeepers in anticipation of a spring tourist boom in Savannah, while even a rural Georgia city devastated by manufacturing losses is putting some people back to work as construction begins on a $57 million private prison.

Where is that?

The right of students to breathe clean air --Erin Hurley of SAVE @ VCC 24 March 2011

Erin Hurley provided the very model of how to give a speech:

I'm the president of Students Against Violating the Environment at VSU. I'm here representing 200+ members of SAVE, that consists of students, faculty, community members. We are deeply concerned with environmental issues and we are networking together to make this city a more humane and sustainable community for future generations.

As a student, I feel I have the right to be able to breathe clean air at the college I attend. With this biomass plant possibly being built here, the future for generations to come are in jeopardy, and we want to protect our fellow and future students' health.

Please take into consideration the future health of this university and its community, and don't sell grey water to the proposed biomass plant.

Here's the video:

Erin Hurley, President of SAVE, Students Against Violating the Environment, speaking at
Regular meeting of the Valdosta City Council, 24 March 2011,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia.

Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

She said who she was, who she represented, how many, what they were for, what they wanted, quickly enough that attention didn't waver, slowly and loudly enough to be heard, and briefly enough to transcribe, with pathos, logic, and politic. Even the mayor looked up at "As a student...."

-jsq

Scotland planning more offshore wind power than needed for all its homes

Aaron Colter wrote 23 March 2011: 5 GW Of Offshore Scottish Wind Power By 2020?

The Scottish Government has released a plan for offshore wind that highlights six areas for potential development. The original plan had selected ten regions for offshore renewable energy, however, four were ultimately abandoned due to predicted negative environmental and economic impact.

The six sites still in the running have an estimated energy potential of nearly five gigawatts by 2020, or enough to power 3 million homes. Richard Lochhead, Rural Affairs and Environment Secretary, said that Scotland’s commitment to offshore wind production could generate over $11 billion for the country’s economy and support up to 28,000 jobs over the next ten years.

For comparison, Scotland has about 370,000 households. According to the General Record Office for Scotland, Estimates of Households and Dwellings in Scotland, 2009:

In mid-2009, there were 2.34 million households in Scotland

That's right, they're talking eight 1.28 times as much power as all of Scotland's homes could use. I would guess this means they plan to export some of that power, perhaps to England.

It seems renewable energy planning has spread beyond the Highlands to the rest of Scotland.

-jsq

Update 6:45 PM 3 Apr 2011: Fixed total household number; thanks to Malcom Smith for catching this typo.

Kia and education: a connection after all

It turns out there is a connection of the Troup County Kia plant to education, but it's not to the K-12 schools. The Karen Kennedy GeorgiaTrend article, LaGrange/Troupe County: The Kia Effect, devotes one paragraph to K-12 schools and ten paragraphs to West Georgia Tech, the local technical college.

Here are the last three of those paragraphs:

The center “will educate a person to work in an advanced manufacturing plant,” Gilley says, just the kind of plants that are coming to Troup County over the next year or so. Using industry-standard equipment, students will be educated to meet the manufacturing community’s workforce needs.

In fact, the manufacturing community already is calling on the center. DaeLim, a supplier to Kia and Hyundai (the latter has a plant nearby in Alabama), expressed interest in students doing prototyping of plastic parts once the center, which opened June 1, is up and running.

“We’ve left a good platform on which to build. We have good faculty, good staff. I think we have good community relations,” Gilley says of his time at West Georgia. Then he looks to the future and what he’ll miss most about his job. “We offer programs that allow people to get better paying jobs. I’ll miss having the power to make decisions that change people’s lives.”

Hm, so the locals think the technical college has more to do with industry than the K-12 schools.

An article by Jeff Bishop in Times-Herald.com, Partnerships may develop between CEC, new hospitals, notes the connection between high schools and industry is through West Georgia Tech.

Hm, maybe Wiregrass Technical College could be important....

-jsq

Private Prisons failing in Texas, leaving locals in lurch

John Burnett writes for NPR that Private Prison Promises Leave Texas Towns In Trouble:

It seemed like a good idea at the time when the west Texas farming town of Littlefield borrowed $10 million and built the Bill Clayton Detention Center in a cotton field south of town in 2000. The charmless steel-and-cement-block buildings ringed with razor wire would provide jobs to keep young people from moving to Lubbock or Dallas.

For eight years, the prison was a good employer. Idaho and Wyoming paid for prisoners to serve time there. But two years ago, Idaho pulled out all of its contract inmates because of a budget crunch at home. There was also a scandal surrounding the suicide of an inmate.

Shortly afterward, the for-profit operator, GEO Group, gave notice that it was leaving, too. One hundred prison jobs disappeared. The facility has been empty ever since.

The pullquote:

Gigabit Internet in Chattanooga

If we're going to copy Chattanooga about something, how about this: 133 US cities now have their own broadband networks by Nate Anderson in Ars Technica:

Such publicly owned networks can offer services that incumbents don't, such as the 1Gbps fiber network in Chattanooga, Tennessee, run by the government-owned electric power board. And they sometimes have more incentive to reach every resident, even in surrounding rural areas, in ways that might not make sense for a profit-focused company.

According to this map of Community Broadband Networks by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, quite a few small cities in south Georgia have municipal cable networks:

All three of Moultrie, Thomasville, and Cairo use CNS, whose brochure for Moultrie says you can get:

Downstream	Upstream	Monthly Cost
5 Mbps	1 Mbps	$29.95
12 Mbps	2 Mbps	$35.95
22 Mbps	3 Mbps	$49.95

Now that's not 1 Gbps, but it's a darn sight faster than the allegedly 3Mbps AT&T DSL!

If Moultrie, Thomasville, and Cairo, and yes, Doerun can do this, why can't Valdosta and Hahira?

And then how about add on a wireless network to reach the rest of us rural folk?

Maybe then we wouldn't be the Internet backwoods.

-jsq

Thanks to George Rhynes for the district number label idea --Tim Carroll @ VCC 24 March 2011

A small example of following up on citizen suggestions, but who knows? maybe it's a sign of much more to come. In the comments by council members at the end of the 24 March 2011 Valdosta City Council session, member Tim Carroll thanked George Rhynes for his suggestion to put district numbers on council members' name plates so citizens could more easily tell which was their council member. Caroll raised his plate up so everyone could see it has a number on it, too, now. Other Council members also commented on various things.

Regular meeting of the Valdosta City Council, 24 March 2011,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

George suggested the district number labels on 20 January 2011.

-jsq