Richard Florida wrote in the Atlantic in December 2009,
How the Crash Will Reshape America:
Big, talent-attracting places benefit from accelerated rates of “urban metabolism,”The question we need to address is how to be a small talent-attracting place, and even more a smallish place that grows its own talent and jobs.
This part is especially relevant: Continue reading
Georgia Tech Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones spole January 2010 at TEDxAtlanta, Retrofitting suburbia
Here’s the video: Continue readingIn the last 50 years, we’ve been building the suburbs with a lot of unintended consequences. And I’m going to talk about some of those consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects that I think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia. So whether it’s redeveloping dying malls or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots, I think the fact is, the growing number of empty and under-performing, especially, retail sites throughout suburbia gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places. And in the process, what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost, and have the infrastructure in place, instead of continuing to tear down trees and to tear up the green space out at the edges.
Liane Yvkoff wrote for cartech today, Solar Roadways to build solar-powered parking lot
Solar Roadways received a $750,000 grant from the Federal Highway Administration to build a parking lot paved with solar panels.
Last year the green infrastructure company demoed a 12 square-foot prototype of its solar road as phase 1 of this new technology. The prototype was made up of solar panels, heating elements, and a grid of wireless LED lights encased in durable glass that has the same traction as asphalt and doesn’t cause glare. The panels generate a total of 7.6 kilowatt hours of electricity per day that can be used to melt snow and ice, spell warnings for motorists, or be connected to weight sensitive panels that illuminate a crosswalk when activated. The solar road can also be connected to a smart grid to power nearby homes and businesses, or even electric cars.
-gretchen
Pat Prokop reported for WTOC 4 August 2011, Darien water treatment plant gets solar panels:
Prokop put a bunch of pictures on facebook.A McIntosh County water treatment plant is going green and saving hundreds of dollars in utility bills.
The city of Darien’s wastewater treatment plant outfitted the facility with solar panels. The city was able to invest more than $1 million on renovations and upgrades to the wastewater collection system, lift stations and treatment plant.
Where did Darien get the money? Continue reading
Among regions, the South has the largest number of clean economy jobs though the West has the largest share relative to its population. Seven of the 21 states with at least 50,000 clean economy jobs are in the South. Among states, California has the highest number of clean jobs but Alaska and Oregon have the most per worker.
A per-county map is included, on which you can see North Carolina
and Atlanta, but nothing in south Georgia.
Let’s put Lowndes County on the clean energy map!
The gigaom article recommends:
To help boost the clean energy economy even more, the Brookings report suggests that Congress could pass a national clean energy standard, put a price on carbon, use the government as a chief customer of cleantech goods (Obama has been strong on this), find more ways to help proven clean technologies pass the so-called Valley of Death, as well as increase funding for basic science and early-stage high risk projects (like the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program).
That’s good stuff, but we don’t have to wait for the feds.
The
Wiregrass Solar plant
sets a precedent that we can build on.
That plant is readily
expandable to an additional megawatt.
It can also be used to attract financing for other projects,
projects that can use local labor, for example
solar electricity and hot water like the example in Quitman.
Lots of places have forged ahead into real clean energy on their own, such as Birmingham, England and San Antonio.
Sure, we’re not nearly as big as those places, or so local “leaders” remind me. So let’s find some projects of our scale that we can do, and let’s do them! A real leader might say, as Mayor Julian Castro of San Antonio did, that renewable energy is
That opportunity is right here in south Georgia, waiting for us to seize it.“…the nexus between sustainability and job creation. Every now and then, perhaps once in a generation, there presents itself a moment, an opportunity, for those cities that are willing to seize it, to truly benefit the region for generations to come.”
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Katie Fehrenbacher wrote 12 July 2011 for gigaom, The clean economy employs more workers than fossil fuels,
Qualified because Brookings includes not only wastewater and mass transit (good stuff, albeit a bit odd fit) but also biomass (ick).The green technology and clean power industries are currently employing more workers than their dirty fossil fuel peers. That’s according to a report released from the Brookings Institution, which has crunched the numbers of jobs created in the U.S. by sectors like solar, wind, waste water recycling, public transportation and energy efficiency retrofits.
However, even during the recession,
…newer clean economy establishments— especially those in young energy-related segments such as wind energy, solar PV, and smart grid—added jobs at a torrid pace, albeit from small bases.
Not just jobs, but good-paying jobs:
The clean economy offers more opportunities and better pay for low- and middle-skilled workers than the national economy as a whole. Median wages in the clean economy—meaning those in the middle of the distribution—are 13 percent higher than median U.S. wages. Yet a disproportionate percentage of jobs in the clean economy are staffed by workers with relatively little formal education in moderately well-paying “green collar” occupations.
Yeah, but what does that mean to us? See next post.
-jsq
Craig Howley, Jerry Johnson, Jennifer Petrie wrote 1 February 2011,
Consolidation of Schools and Districts: What the Research Says and What it Means:
…the review of research evidence detailed in this brief suggests that a century of consolidation has already produced most of the efficiencies obtainable. Research also suggests that impoverished regions in particular often benefit from smaller schools and districts, and they can suffer irreversible damage if consolidation occurs.Isn’t such irreversible damage what Rev. Floyd Rose got Mrs. Ruth Council to admit?
They are referring to black schools before desegregation in the 1960s.Rev. Rose: “…we were told about the world, where we came from, how we got here.”
Mrs. Council: “I think we did receive a better education.”
Rev. Floyd Rose is president of the local SCLC, and here is a statement by Leigh Touchton, president of the local NAACP: Continue reading
Georgia Power will buy solar by 2015, By Associated Press – Athens Banner-Herald, 24 July 2011:
Continue readingATLANTA — The Public Service Commission has approved Georgia Power’s plans to buy up to 50 megawatts of solar power by 2015.
The utility plans to strike agreements with individual solar-power producers to meet the deadline. The providers would have to be able to connect to the transmission system for Georgia Power or its sister utilities in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi.
It seems to me the burden of proof is on the people proposing to make massive changes in the local education system. And CUEE has not provided any evidence for their position. Sam Allen of Friends of Valdosta City Schools (FVCS) pithily sums up CUEE:
“It’s not about the children. It’s about somebody’s ego.”
I don’t think the children should have to suffer for somebody’s ego.
CUEE’s unification push isn’t about education. It’s about a “unified platform” to attract industry. That alone is enough reason to oppose “unification”. It’s not about education!
As former Industrial Authority Chair Jerome Tucker has been heard to remark on numerous occassions, “nobody ever asked me how many school systems we had!” The only example in Georgia CUEE points to for this is the Kia plant that came to Troup County, Georgia. It’s funny how none of the locals seem to have mentioned any such connection in the numerous articles published about the Kia plant. Instead, the mayor of the town with the Kia plant complains that his town doesn’t have a high school. That’s right: he’s complaining that the school system is too consolidated! The only actual education between Kia and education in Troup County is with West Georgia Tech, the local technical college.
CUEE has finally cobbled together an education committee, but it won’t even report back before the proposed ballot referendum vote. CUEE has no plan to improve education.
If CUEE actually did want to help the disadvantaged in the Valdosta City schools, Continue reading
There are other things Valdosta could do, such as what the VSU
Faculty Senate did:
pass a resolution opposing biomass.
Remember,
the mayor of Gretna, Florida did that.
If little old Gretna can do it, TitleTown USA can do it!
The Valdosta City Council could also hold an ethics investigation of their own appointees to the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority, on the topic of why those appointees are in favor of a project with demonstrated health hazards to the community.
Short of that, Valdosta could demand transparency from VLCIA: Continue reading