Tag Archives: Activism

Wikileaks wins against VISA

Kim Zetter wrote today for Wired Threat Level, WikiLeaks Wins Icelandic Court Battle Against Visa for Blocking Donations

The Icelandic partner of Visa and MasterCard violated contract laws when it imposed a block against credit card donations to the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks, a district court there has ruled.

The Reykjavík District Court ruled that Valitor, which handles Visa and MasterCard payments in Iceland, was in the wrong when it prevented card holders from donating funds to the site. The court ruled that the block should be removed within 14 days or Valitor will be fined the equivalent of about $6,000 a day.

WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson told the Associated Press that it was “a small but very important step in fighting back against these powerful banks.” He said other lawsuits are ongoing in Denmark and Belgium.

The fine isn’t nearly big enough, and of course Valitor is appealing.

“This is a significant victory against Washington’s attempt to silence WikiLeaks,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said in a statement about the win in Iceland. “We will not be silenced. Economic censorship is censorship. It is wrong. When it’s done outside of the rule of law it’s doubly wrong. One by one those involved in the attempted censorship of WikiLeaks will find themselves on the wrong side of history.”

They tried to silence Ben Franklin, too, for distributing some government communications that he got from an anonymous source.

“Those who would give up Essential Liberty
to purchase a little Temporary Safety,
deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
—Benjamin Franklin, An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania, 1759

History found old Ben to be on the right side. It will find the same about Julian Assange. Which side are you on?

-jsq

Duke and Progress to buy Santee-Cooper’s Summer nuke?

I erred in saying Duke owns nuclear Summer Station in North Carolina: it’s actually owned by SCANA and Santee Cooper. But I wasn’t as wrong as I thought. It looks like somebody’s been pressuring Duke and Progress, the two utilities currently maybe merging, to buy Summer.

John D. Runkle, attorney for NC WARN, hand-delivered a letter to Robert Gruber Executive Director Public Staff of the NC Utilities Commission on 18 June 2012, Re: INVESTIGATION — Duke-Progress Merger

In preparing comments on the Duke-Progress merger on behalf of the NC Waste Awareness and Reduction Network (NC WARN), we came across several reports that South Carolina officials, including the South Carolina Public Service Commission, were pressuring the utilities to purchase the State-owned Santee Cooper’s shares of the V.C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station.

Santee Cooper owns one-third of the present reactor and 45% of the proposed units 2 and 3. Based on the recent cost estimate of $9.8 billion, buying Santee Cooper’s share would add about $4.5 billion to the cost of the merger. But those are low-ball estimates; other nuclear units in the Southeast are projected to cost roughly twice as much. Realistically, purchasing Santee Cooper’s share would likely add much more to the cost of the merger.

We were unable to find any filings in either the South Carolina or North Carolina dockets regarding the V.C. Summer Station. If a purchase of nuclear units in South Carolina has been made a condition to the merger, it should be part of the public record, and not as some backroom negotiation.

I’d like to see that.

Even more I’d like to see this:

Continue reading →

Live streaming of Public Service Commission Forum tonight

All candidates for the Georgia Public Service Commission at a forum tonight, 7-9PM 12 July 2012. GA PSC is the body that says Georgia Power can charge its customers for cost overruns for the new nukes at Plant Vogtle; the new nukes that will suck up even more water and are already sucking up lots of money through the stealth tax Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) charge on Georgia Power customer bills. GA PSC did require Georgia Power to buy 50 MW of solar, but that’s pennies compared to the dollars Georgia Power and Southern Company are shovelling into that pit by the Savannah River. Who will stand up and say enough nuclear is too much, and let’s get on with solar and wind?

Georgia Interfaith Power and Light blogged today, PSC Debate Tonight,

Tonight, GIPL is joining forces with 14 local organizations to host a Political Forum with this year’s candidates for the Public Service Commission.

We’re having technical difficulties with the live web stream. We hope it will be up and running tonight, but if not, the debate will be posted online this week. You can check this website tonight at 7pm for live web streaming, or watch our twitter feed @GeorgiaIPL for updates.

When: Thursday, July 12, 7 – 9 p.m.
Where: Glenn Memorial UMC’s Auditorium/Sanctuary
1660 N. Decatur Road
Atlanta, GA 30307

All four challengers in the 2012 race have confirmed their attendance. Participants

Continue reading →

Air is a public trust: Texas judge

The air is, after all, a bigger body than any body of water, and one that affects us all. A judge in Texas agreed that air should have the same legal protection as water.

Philip Bump wrote for Grist 10 July 2012, Texas judge rules that the atmosphere is protected under the public trust doctrine

Last May, a group of teenagers filed a series of lawsuits seeking to force the federal and state governments to take action on climate change. A key argument made in the lawsuits is that the atmosphere is a public trust — or, as described in one brief, that it is a “fundamental natural resource necessarily entrusted to the care of our federal government … for its preservation and protection as a common property interest.”

Yesterday, a state district court judge in Texas agreed.

Key issue from the plaintiffs' press release:

In deferring to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality's (TCEQ) decision to deny the Plaintiffs' petition for rulemaking while other ongoing litigation over regulations ensues, the Judge concluded that the TCEQ's determination that the Public Trust Doctrine is exclusively limited to the conservation of water, was legally invalid. …

Which is not only good for air, but indicates that water already is legally a public trust.

-jsq

 

Southern Co. nuclear cost overruns expected? Let’s build solar and wind on time and on budget!

So if Southern Company expected cost overruns at Plant Vogtle, why didn’t they make a better estimate in the first place? What incentive do they have not to continue running up the cost and delaying completion, since they get to keep charging Georgia Power customers for construction, including for cost overruns, while floating $8.3 billion in federally guaranteed loans? Where is the financial integrity in all that?

AP reported yesterday, and even Fox News carried it, Building costs increase at US nuclear sites. They’re not talking about housing prices near the sites, either.

America’s first new nuclear plants in more than a decade are costing billions more to build and sometimes taking longer to deliver than planned, problems that could chill the industry’s hopes for a jumpstart to the nation’s new nuclear age.

Licensing delay charges, soaring construction expenses and installation glitches as mundane as misshapen metal bars have driven up the costs of three plants in Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina, from hundreds of millions to as much as $2 billion, according to an Associated Press analysis of public records and regulatory filings.

Those problems, along with jangled nerves from last year’s meltdown in Japan and the lure of cheap natural gas, could discourage utilities from sinking cash into new reactors, experts said. The building slowdown would be another blow to the so-called nuclear renaissance, a drive over the past decade to build 30 new reactors to meet the country’s growing power needs. Industry watchers now say that only a handful will be built this decade.

“People are looking at these things very carefully,” said Richard Lester, head of the department of nuclear science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Inexpensive gas alone, he said, “is casting a pretty long shadow over the prospects” for construction of new nuclear plants.

AP continues with a list of late and over-budget nuke projects, including Southern Company’s Plant Vogtle $800 million over and seven months late, TVA’s Watts Bar plant $2 billion over and 3 years late, Duke’s Plant Summer SCANA and Santee Cooper’s Summer Station $670 million over and a year late.

Southern Co. and others in the nuclear business say cost overruns are expected in projects this complex…

So why are they wasting our money on nukes when they could be deploying a lot more solar and wind on time and on budget?

…and that they are balanced out by other savings over the life of the plant. Southern Co. expects Plant Vogtle will cost $2 billion less to operate over its 60-year lifetime than initially projected because of anticipated tax breaks and historically low interest rates.

Get that? “anticipated tax breaks” that leave we the taxpayers Continue reading →

Closing one end of Brinson Drive to stop speeders @ LCC 2012-06-26

Closing one end of a dirt road to stop speeders: it turns out the county can do that, after all! And it’s a popular thing to do.

One spoke against, but changed to be for. Three others spoke for. The agenda item at the 26 June 2012 Regular Session of the Lowndes County Commission was

7. Public Hearing: Abandonment of a Portion of Brinson Drive
  • John L. Lewis who lives in Lanier County but owns property at 4718 Brinson Road spoke against closing Brinson Drive. County Engineer Mike Fletcher clarified that they weren’t closing the whole road; they were abandoning a portion of it near Pikes Pond Road, making Brinson a dead end to stop speeding through traffic. Lewis seemed mollified.
  • Richard Rigby spoke for the closing of Brinson Road, saying it was the greatest thing the Commission had done in the last ten years, other than keeping Haunted House Road open.
  • Amanda Parker spoke for closing Brinson Drive; she lives on Oak Hill Drive at the end of Brinson and almost got run over that morning.
  • Loretta Steed spoke for closing Brinson Drive; she lives on Pikes Pond Road near one end of Brinson. She said she had been against the closing until she learned from Rigby that the county was keeping Haunted House Road open. Instead she wanted to know how it would be closed so as to stop the speeders from getting on it. Chairman Paulk said a culvert would be removed.
  • Commissioners voted unanimously to close one end of Brinson Drive.

Three years ago in a similar situation, the county insisted on paving Quarterman Road instead. Quarterman Road, which, unlike Brinson Drive, doesn’t even go anywhere. Paving resulted in speeders and drag racers through a residential neighborhood. As resident Carolyn Selby put it:

You designed a mile and a half straight-away, and they have come. Welcome to the Quarterman Road Drag Strip!

The county continues to insist speed humps are out of the question. It’s good to hear Commissioners have become concerned about safety somewhere in the county.

-jsq

Historical Population, Lowndes County, Georgia

Increased population is using increasing resources in Lowndes County, Georgia:

Increased population is using increasing resources

Increased population is using increasing resources
Chart by John S. Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE) from Georgiainfo data.

CensusPop.
1830 2,453
1840 5,574
1850 7,714
1860 5,249
1870 8,321
1880 11,049
1890 15,102
1900 20,036
1910 24,436
1920 26,521
1930 29,994
1940 31,860
1950 35,211
1960 49,270
1970 55,112
1980 67,972
1990 75,981
2000 92,115
2010 109,233
Georgiainfo data

The population of Georgia has almost tripled during my lifetime, has about doubled since 1970, and has increased 18% in just the ten years from 2000 to 2010. That blip up between 1950 and 1960 is Moody Air Force Base.

That kind of growth doesn’t happen without increased resource use. If we want a livable county and region for ourselves and our descendants, we need to think about what we’re doing, with water, with transportation, and with energy, not to mention education, jobs, and pretty much everything else. We already cut down and sold off almost all the forests. Now we need better ways than using up all the resources that were here.

Hm, how about some knowledge-based jobs in energy and telecommunications and agriculture?

Speaking of Moody, the U.S. military learned in Afghanistan that shipping oil to places where you can generate solar energy produces a vulnerable supply chain. Moody is already leading in local solar energy. How about we help our base help us help them to move ahead in solar for everybody in Lowndes County and the state of Georgia?

-jsq

T-SPLOST trust problem

There’s a bigger T-SPLOST trust problem than Jim Galloway wrote about in the AJC on 30 June 2012, in Trust and the transportation sales tax,

But there is a larger unease growing, at least within the DeKalb and Fulton county political communities. As Republicans finally turn their heads toward the need for a regional transportation solution, some African-American lawmakers and other elected officials worry that their role in a transit system that they have managed for better than three decades is about to be lessened — or largely subverted.

Galloway went into great detail as to why there’s a lack of trust between those and other groups in metro Atlanta about T-SPLOST. David Pendered examined similar political fissures 28 May 2012 in the SaportaReport.

Neither Galloway nor Pendered mentioned a bigger lack of trust on the part of the rest of the state: Continue reading →

Nuclear and coal burning water: solar doesn’t

Solar power is the smart thing to do for jobs, energy independence, and profit. It’s also what we need to do to save water.

Julia Pyper and ClimateWire wrote for Scientific American 29 June 2012, Electricity Generation ‘Burning’ Rivers of Drought-Scorched Southeast: A new report reckons the water cost of electricity generation

Power plants are guzzling water across the United States and increasing the risk of blackouts in the Southeast, where the precious resource is drying up.

“Burning Our Rivers,” a new report by the River Network, found that it takes about 40,000 gallons of water to meet the average American household’s energy needs, which is five times more than the amount of water used directly in that home….

Table 3. Total Water Footprint of a Kilowatt-hour
(Gallons per kWh)
2009 U.S. Electric Grid
(National weighted average)
Hydroelectric 29.920
Coal 7.143
Natural Gas 1.512
Nuclear 2.995
Geothermal 0.002
Solar 0.002
Wind 0.001
Total 41.575

In the Southeast, which has been battling a drought for more than a year, the impact of power plants is especially worrisome and could lead to brownouts and blackouts throughout the summer and beyond.

“The conflicts between energy and water needs are ones we’ve seen before … and will only worsen as the frequency of drought increases and water temperatures rise driven in part by climate change,” said Ulla Reeves, regional program director at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

The report’s number 1 recommendation:

1. As a nation, we should focus on renewable energy sources and low water technologies.

Why?

Continue reading →

It’s only going to get hotter: time for solar power

Looks like the heat wave is going to continue for a while, according to NOAA’s maximum heat index forecasts. Reuters wrote today,

A heat wave baking the eastern United States in record temperatures is set to continue on Sunday after deadly storms killed at least 12 people, downed power lines from Indiana to Maryland and left more than 3 million customers without power….

Utilities in Ohio, Virginia and Maryland described damage to their power grids as catastrophic.

Laura J. Nelson wrote for the LA Times Friday, As a heat wave rolls across U.S., scientists predict more to come

Continue reading →