Category Archives: History

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 →

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 →