The deadline for comments to the State Department on Keystone XL’s tar sands pipeline is today. I signed for them. Who will you sign for?
Category: social justice
Now the real work begins
The fight to stop Plant Washington is going to get very interesting because developer Dean Alford’s filings with the EPA will be subject to Open Records sunlight.
Alford claims he met EPA requirements to “commence construction” by midnight April 12 when he signed a boiler contract with IHI Corporation in Japan and a site erection contract with Zachry Industrial in the United States.
EPA “commence construction” requires more than signing a contract. Georgia EPD staffer Jac Capp told the Macon Telegraph earlier this month that commence construction, “means that the source has both ‘begun a continuous program of actual on-site construction’ and ‘entered into binding agreements or contractual obligations which cannot be canceled without a substantial loss.’
Last Saturday, a day drenched in brilliant sunlight, I drove past the plant site. There was a dead armadillo in the road, but except for some March storm damage, not much has changed on either side of the Mayview Road, which divides the plant site, since January 2008. The dirt roads crossing the plant have no tracks indicating heavy equipment has moved in for construction work ahead.
Meeting the requirement of a “substantial loss” will now require more than Alford saying there are “several” entities lined up for this project, which is all he offered to the Atlanta Journal Constitution in January 2012 when his largest backer, Cobb EMC walked from the project. Earlier this month Alford told the Macon Telegraph he has “way over the amount of money I need for this project.” Hopefully the contract documents will soon be made public so that we’ll finally get a chance to see what all this talk is made of, and who is willing to invest in it besides the latecomer to the game, designated hitter Taylor Energy Fund.
There are brand spanking new coal plants, some built and owned by EMCs, like Spiritwood in Minnesota, which have never powered a single light bulb because the operating costs were prohibitive. Other plants, like Prairie State in Illinois, have saddled ratepayers with higher rates before supplying them with any power.
Sure, I wish Alford had called it a day late last Friday night, but I am not surprised. He doesn’t live here, he doesn’t rely on the local groundwater when he wants a drink of water, and his grandchildren won’t be breathing Plant Washington toxins into their lungs when they play outside.
For those of us who have real skin in the game, the work has just begun.
Poem in Your Pocket
Today is National Poem in Your Pocket Day, which is part of the month-long celebration of poetry this month.
I had a few ideas on the poem I would carry today, but after Monday’s heartbreaking tragedy in Boston, I returned, as I have many times, to John Lennon’s Imagine.
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace
You, you may say
I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world
You, you may say
I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
Wilcox County students say ‘Love has No Color”
The students in Wilcox County are tired of segregated private proms, so they are doing what their parents and school leaders won’t do: organizing an integrated prom so everyone can get dressed up and have fun, together. It will be the colors of their dresses and bow ties that matter the night of April 27, not the color of their skin. They set up a page on Face Book and are raising money for their dance, which will be held in Cordele.
Bran Long at Better Georgia sent out this email yesterday:
If you haven’t already heard, Wilcox County high school students have said they won’t go another year with a segregated prom.
It’s 2013 and integration is long overdue.
Since they couldn’t get the support of their high school or many of their parents, they’re just going to do it themselves.
The AJC just reported on Better Georgia’s challenge to elected officials in Georgia to support Wilcox County’s student-organized integrated prom.
It’s pretty simple: love has no color.
So while we’re waiting to see which elected officials publicly or financially support this integrated prom, here are two things you can do to help right now:
1. Get on Facebook and ‘Like’ their page. Then share it on your page and spread to your friends.
2. Use the Twitter hashtag #integratedprom to spread the word and encourage your elected officials to support this simple effort.
Lot’s of Georgia’s problems are big and too difficult for one person or one group to fix alone. Broken roads and schools. Defunded health care. Rampant corruption under the Gold Dome.
But this problem is both big — and easily fixed.
Don’t just sit on the sidelines. Support these brave kids as they teach the adults in their community a lesson in compassion and love.
This one is easy.
Thanks,
Executive Director
Better Georgia
You can’t take “way over” to the bank
Last Wednesday’s Macon Telegraph included coverage of the long-lingering proposed Plant Washington and developer Dean Alford’s race to meet an April 12 “commence construction” carbon pollution rule deadline set by the EPA almost a year ago.
Should someone call or email Alford? Maybe he missed exactly what the EPA said when it announced the carbon rule (see section 2.2.4). Maybe he hasn’t seen the EPA filings specifically about Plant Washington, or the news coverage and numerous web site postings in the past year pointing out that beating the clock on the April 12 deadline won’t help his no-bid project.
When the EPA announced the deadline, the agency said very clearly that to be exempt from the carbon rule, new coal plants had to have a final permit in hand.
Plant Washington didn’t have a final permit when the rule was announced.
So it isn’t exempt from the carbon emission rules when you get right down to what the EPA said. We all know from past playground experience, whoever makes the rules also gets to enforce them.
The EPA knows exactly when Alford got a final permit because last spring in another set of court filings pertaining to mercury emissions, the agency refers to Plant Washington’s lack of a final permit at the time the carbon rule was announced. The EPA’s filing included this, “The Power 4 Georgians’ (“P4G”) Project (Case No. 12-1184): Movants submit a declaration stating that “as of April 9, 2012, P4G has a final PSD permit and all other required permit approvals necessary to commence construction of Plant Washington.” Mot. Ex. H ¶ 5. This assertion is incorrect, inasmuch as state administrative challenges to the P4G permit remain pending.”
Ooops.
Other coal developers did get the news. They ran the numbers again for their projects as natural gas, and even wind and solar, gained more ground in the power generation market.
Like dominoes, developers began cancelling proposed plants, even in coal friendly states like Texas. The math just didn’t add up any longer. They couldn’t finance, build, and then sell coal-generated power for a profit. They said new coal can’t compete, and existing coal isn’t so cheap either. Beating an April 12 deadline wouldn’t help them. They couldn’t afford to go forward.
Despite the fact that the carbon rule does apply to Plant Washington (and Alford said that having to meet carbon rules would kill the project), Alford has continued talking up his project and making a lot out of meeting the April 12 deadline.
Earlier this week Alford continued the charade when he told the Telegraph “If I add up everybody I’m talking to, I’ve got way over the amount of money I need for this project.”
“Way over” must be A LOT of money, because conservative 2011 estimates, without carbon controls, put Plant Washington at a whopping $3.9B, almost doubling the original $2.1B estimate in 2008. I can’t imagine how many zeros would be added to a price estimate to engineer and control for carbon.
Alford is “talking to” utilities, private investors, pension funds and independent power producers. (Never mind that one doesn’t “talk to” pension funds, it is the fund manager who must be convinced to invest.) Power4Georgians (P4G) and Washington EMC also think there is no reason to be burdened by a pro forma study or independent market analysis to make the case to investors, so at least they aren’t having to trot out tried and true methods of return on investment to funders.
Oh yeah, “talking to” is also not the same as having power purchase agreements, contractors, an EPA approved boiler design, county issued bonds, or all the financing confirmed.
And in all this “talking to,” who is Alford saying will own this plant which will not only supply power to the power purchase customers, but also repay the debt owed in a timely manner?
When Alford announced Plant Washington in January 2008, he said it would be owned and operated by the EMCs in P4G. I heard it with my own ears because I was in the room. Alford even said that under oath in September 2010.
That all changed when his former employer, Cobb EMC, abandoned the project in January 2012. Alford made a final pitch at that meeting to keep his largest funding source engaged. The Marietta Daily Journal’s coverage last year included this from the Cobb EMC minutes, “Power4Georgians owns the permits but he (Dean Alford) stated that P4G never intended to build Plant Washington. He stated P4G’s goal has always been to obtain the permits needed and then sell them to any interested party that could build the plant.”
In January 2012 Alford told the AJC there were “hundred of entities” interested in this project. If the contracts were real, investors were lining up to get a piece of this project, and an owner had been secured, wouldn’t they have been paraded out by now?
The time for Alford and the four remaining EMCs to call it a day on Plant Washington is “way over.”
There’s no need to wait until April 12.
When the unthinkable happens, who will step up?
There is no hiding behind the fact that the explosion at coal-fired Plant Bowen yesterday could happen at any of the power plants in Washington County. Accidents happen.
Plant Washington developer Dean Alford has never actually built a coal plant. Should we be checking his firefighting credentials too? How about the firefighting credentials of local business owners who are banking on tidy profits associated with the plant? How many elected leaders will suit up in fire gear? Will Washington EMC Board Members and Senior Management race in to help?
The EPD told citizens that plant operators would be required to handle a fire or accident should there be one at Plant Washington. We can’t get them to show up for a fish kill, so my confidence in assurances about public safety are zero.
Local volunteer firefighters have told me there is no way we have adequate fire fighting capacity to fight fires at the two natural gas peaker plants here or a coal-fired plant. They also told me they won’t suit up because a fire at any of these plants would be more than our local folks could handle.
Just how far are local leaders willing to go at the expense of our health and safety? And if they wouldn’t risk their lives, or those of their families, to protect Plant Washington, how can they expect anyone else to do the same?
Easter Week: Mistaken Identity, Keystone XL Pipeline, and Alleluias
This post is reprinted here with permission from Betsy Blake Bennett,
Archdeacon of the Episcopal Diocese of Nebraska
Easter Week: Mistaken Identity, Keystone XL Pipeline, and Alleluias
In the Gospel lesson for the Tuesday in Easter Week (John20:11-18), Mary Magdalene is so caught up in her grief over Jesus’ death and her despair over the disappearance of his body that when she turns around and sees Jesus, she doesn’t recognize him. Instead, she mistakes him for the gardener. She comes out of her grief and despair enough to see what is right before her eyes when she responds to hearing the risen Jesus call her by name.
One of the many joys of Easter in our tradition is the restoration of the alleluias that disappear during the somber Lenten season. Some parishes do a sort of ceremony of burying the alleluias on Ash Wednesday to help children grasp something of our Lenten practices. When Lent ends, our alleluias at the breaking of the bread in the Eucharist and at the dismissal bring notes of joy and hope and renewed energy that can remain with us as we go into the week to love and serve Christ.
Most of us experience the return of the alleluias as a welcome return to a spiritual norm of joy, while others, especially in times when we have faced a great loss or difficult challenges, when we are grieving or in despair, may find ourselves more in tune with the quieter but no less faithful wilderness walk of Lent. But Easter comes along whether or not we are ready for it, even when we are so deeply into grief or despair that we can’t imagine finding hope or joy again.
Yesterday evening I attended one of the planning meetings for people opposed to TransCanada being given a permit to build the proposed Keystone XL pipeline to transport Alberta tar sands through the central United States, including Nebraska, to Gulf Coast refineries. The purpose of these planning meetings is to help pipeline opponents be well-prepared to testify at the State Department hearingsscheduled to be held at the Heartland Event Center in Grand Island on April 18. The pipeline fighters face huge odds given the money and political power of the oil industry. It’s one of those daunting challenges that could make our alleluias ring hollow.
And yet when I listened to leaders from the Sierra Club and Bold Nebraska, and when I heard the discussion by those who plan to be at the hearings either to testify against the permit or to support those testifying against it, it felt like an alleluia response. We know that grassroots opposition to the pipeline has delayed its construction so far. We know that landowners, environmental activists, people of faith, and others will keep fighting the construction of this pipeline and the expanded mining of the Alberta tar sands. There is something very good and life-giving here.
Even if President Obama denies the permit to build this pipeline, the challenge of keeping greenhouse gas emissions to a level that gives us a chance of a sustainable future is a huge challenge. If our expectations and hopes are of a future that resembles today’s business as usual, we may not recognize whatever signs of a realistic hope we might encounter. That doesn’t mean that hope isn’t there; it doesn’t mean that grief and despair are the only valid responses to our situation.
When Bill McKibben’s Do the Math tour visited Omaha, he said that he became discouraged at first when people pointed out that he was involved in a David and Goliath situation, but then he remembered how that story ends. Easter tells us the end of the bigger story, and it calls for an alleluia response.
Alleluia! Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
A sure way to break up an Easter egg hunt
Rings and licenses
The Friday Photo
A weekly photo inspired by art, community and spontaneity
March 29, 2013
I got this ring almost 29 years ago. It has a lot of miles on it.
There are millions just like it, some brand new and waiting to be exchanged, others worn thinner after decades of doing all the things that make up our adult lives.
The day I got my ring I also signed a marriage license in North Carolina to go with it.
This week we’ve heard a lot about who should, or should not, be able to get a marriage license.
What real benefits do we gain as a country because we deny consenting adults the right to be legally married anywhere within our borders?
And who are we fooling if we think we are better for it?
Speak up TODAY to protect Georgia’s rivers, property rights, and taxpayers.
As the clock runs out on this year’s General Assembly session, the House is yet to take action on S.B. 213, a water rights bill drenched in bad policies. The Rules Committee will consider it first, and I’ve already been in touch with my local rep, Mack Jackson, a Rule members, who took time yesterday to thank me for bringing the issues to his attention via email.
This bill, as passed by the Senate, included a Yes vote by my absentee freshman senator, David Lucas. He must not know, or care, that his district includes rivers which could be put at risk for reduced downstream flow, as well as stripping away water rights for his constituents.
This bill allows government to step in and make decisions impacting property owners and taxpayers without public hearings. It puts government and private business ahead of citizens. It threatens property owner’s access to water that flows through their land in rivers and streams, or under their land.
S.B. 213 is poisonous for our rivers, property owners, farmers, and sportmen.
“Augmentation” threatens Georgia’s riparian rights system – altering fundamental property rights and threatening longstanding Georgia water rights law.
The bill now includes:
- The augmentation provisions allow the EPD director to deny water users that are downstream of an undefined “augmentation” project the use of any of the “augmented” water flowing past their property, without prior opportunity to be heard.
- This provision allows the State to control (or allow a private party to control) a portion of stream flow and prohibit the reasonable use of it, which is akin to prior appropriation of water – a short step from western-type water regulation. State ownership of water is different from the state’s current regulation by permit.
- Property owners in Georgia have a “bundle” of rights that make up their property rights. An essential property right in that bundle is the right to reasonable use of water on or under your property. Allowing the appropriation and state control of water, and not allowing downstream property owners the right to reasonable use of it, radically diminishes that property right.
- An augmentation project to benefit endangered species is already operating on a tributary to the Flint River. This language is not needed to do this augmentation project or protect endangered species.
- The flow augmentation language will allow a hugely expensive, taxpayer-funded, multi-million dollar Aquifer Storage and Recovery/Southwest Georgia Regional Commission Stream Flow Augmentation project to continue to be funded in the lower Flint.
- The water added by this project will flow to Florida while Georgia farmers and other property owners will be denied reasonable use of it.
- The project could add to Metro Atlanta water supply but at an extremely high cost that is projected to fall on Metro utility ratepayers, who already pay the highest water bills in the state.
You need to call your Georgia House member TODAY, right now, before you get another cup of coffee, check Face Book, or think about what you want for lunch. Find your House member’s info here and tell them to oppose S.B. 213 if it includes this language when it reaches them for a vote.
In this week’s mail
The Friday Photo
A weekly photo inspired by art, community and spontaneity
March 22, 2013
This is one of the nice things about living in a rural community.
We don’t agree on Plant Washington, and Larry isn’t even my commissioner.
What’s your personal anthem?
I plugged in my iPod on my way into work this morning, and was surprised to see that Jay Bookman’s column today is all about what I listened to while I drove.
I owned a small market radio station and on September 11, 2001, ABC Radio told affiliates we shouldn’t play John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Well my station did play it.
As the Iraq War began, comments by Natalie Maines of The Dixie Chicks, weren’t well received when she criticized the President (she named W, but should have added President Cheney too).
Male country musicians in particular were among the worse in condemning Maines.
Did that embolden the public to go so far as to threaten her life? It sure didn’t help.
In my family, we bought two copies of “Taking the Long Way.” We went to hear the Dixie Chicks in Atlanta when they toured to promote the CD. And I have the DVD “Shut Up and Sing” for good measure.
We also went to hear Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young tour after Neil Young released “Living with War.” In the documentary about that tour, fans in Atlanta, where we heard CSNY sing, left the concert because they were singing war protest songs.
Hello? Anybody in there? Did they think those four got a different religion on the way to Phillips Arena? (“The Cost of Freedom” was sung with a slide show of soldiers lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the audience came silently to our feet while they performed.)
Oh yeah, we didn’t stop playing the Dixie Chicks at WJFL anymore than we stopped playing John Lennon. We could all use a little more “Give Peace a Chance” too.
We need to be honest about who cares for our seniors
Last week in Chicago the American Society on Aging held a conference packed with ideas and best practices focused on the growing numbers of seniors across our country. Speakers included Janice Lynch Schuster, who guest blogged here recently.
In her comments Lynch Schuster shared these eye-opening data from the Family Caregivers Alliance on who cares for the aging and what impact that work has on the caregivers:
- Right now, 44 million people—2/3 of them women–care for someone who is over 50
- About a third of those are caught in the tragedy and frustration of providing dementia care. And a remarkable one-third care for multiple older adults.
- The average caregiver is a 48 year old woman who is married, works outside the home, and earns $35,000 a year.
- Many of these caregivers are old themselves: and the older they are, the harder they longer they work at providing care. Those over the age of 75 are at it full-time.
- Caregiving hurts women. We report higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress. A quarter have health problems stemming from their caregiving duties. We develop more hypertension, have lower perceived health status; poorer immune function; slower wound healing; and we die more quickly.
- We take a career hit: 1/3 decreased work hours; 1/3 passed up an assignment, promotion, or training; 22% took a leave of absence; 20% switched from full-time to part-time work; 16% quit entirely.
- We take a financial hit to our pension prospects, retirement savings, and Social Security benefits. This adds up to a total loss of more than $325,000 for women (and about $280,000 for men).With that kind of money, you could buy a really good long-term care insurance policy: But it gets the caregiver little that is tangible in return.
As pointed out in the data here, the women are doing the heavy lifting (literally and figuratively) for our elders.
Lynch Schuster likens the care of our seniors to a trend which will, and should, become another rallying point among women, families, and eventually men.
She says this about the demands and expectations which take a toll on women:
“A word about men: Statistics indicate that more men are becoming family caregivers—but for any number of reasons (cultural, social, gender, whatever), the actual hands-on work overwhelmingly falls to women, and men focus more on things like financial management and hiring aides.
Like childcare, caregiving to adult family members is women’s second shift. Early feminists wanted the movement to open up society—to let men change diapers and take paternity leave and allow women be CEOs and secretaries of state—and caregiving will have to do that too. But first, we need to make it more prominent.”
She’s right. The burden falls on women. She’s also right when she, and others, say that women need to organize and speak up now. We won’t, can’t, and shouldn’t have to bear the weight of caring for our elders alone. And as the data indicate, before too long the majority of caregivers will become those who need care themselves.
Sign on to improve elder care here. And share this information (because none of us are getting any younger).
Signs of faith
The Friday Photo
A weekly photo inspired by art, community and spontaneity
March 15, 2013
Choosing not to pray isn’t a crime either.
What kind of cheese is on the menu today?
While I was outside at the Dublin High School solar panel groundbreaking ceremony earlier this week, I could hear the sirens’ song beckoning me to the swank Kroger grocery store just up the road.
It didn’t take long to find what I needed, and I began looking for the last thing on my list, “good” cheddar cheese. I walked past the dairy cases but didn’t see what I wanted. I looked again, no luck, and nothing close to it. In all that looking back and forth I saw this sign:
Below it were all kinds of grated cheeses, cubed cheese, and string cheese. I was at a complete loss for what “Hispanic cheese” is, and why these particular cheeses are considered “Hispanic” (Hispanic should be capitalized, FYI).
I wandered back to the deli section, found some Tillamook cheese from Oregon (yum) and paid for my groceries.
Then I asked to speak with a manager.
The young cashier paged Craig Justice. He introduced himself and I asked him if he could “educate” me on a product. We walked to the dairy aisle and I asked him what exactly “Hispanic cheese” is. He wasn’t sure. We looked at all the grated cheese for a while and he said “Maybe for tacos?”
As we stood there I said that in our part of the world, as he probably has seen and heard, Spanish-speaking people aren’t really welcomed here unless they are picking vegetables (and even then, “welcomed” is a stretch). While we talked he finally saw two types of cheese with all Spanish labeling that were obscured from our view.
Labeling them “Hispanic” still didn’t seem right to me. Justice asked for a suggestion and I offered Latin American, which indicates culture, food, geography, history and language instead of a term that is fairly derogatory when used here. he pointed to other signs behind us that read “Latin American” and “Asian.”
Justice agreed there could be other ways to point customers to these those items, and he said he would look for other signage options. And then he did this:
Wow.
I admire Mr Justice for listening, having an open mind, and being committed to customer service. And acting.
I don’t go to Dublin very often, but I do get to the über swank Kroger in Milledgeville pretty often. I do so hope they have Tillamook cheese there too.
Innovative idea for an aging country
Georgians over the age of 65 make up 11 percent of our state’s 9.9M citizens. Over 110K Georgians are 85 and older. Rural Georgians have fewer choices to care for the oldest among us. We lack a strong network of programs like Meals on Wheels, day care programs, home health providers, and nursing and retirement homes.
How will we adequately and compassionately care for all our elders in Georgia and across our country?
Janice Lynch Schuster, poet, award winner writer, and advocate for aging populations, has a suggestion for providing affordable and high quality care for our elders. Her post is reprinted here with her permission.
Caregiver Corps: Tapping A Nation of Caring People
By Janice Lynch Schuster
I recently participated in a Twitterchat (#eldercarechat), where someone raised the question of what we want government to do to improve the lives of the nation’s 60 million family caregivers. Someone suggested creating a Peace Corps-like program to recruit new graduates to serve family caregivers. I immediately volunteered to launch a petition to do just this, and wrote one on the White House website, which encourages civic engagement.
My petition is very short. It seemed to me that in the context of trying to raise interest and garner signatures, I needed to be to the point (http://wh.gov/GURc). It reads:
We petition the Obama Administration to: Create a Caregiver Corps that would include debt forgiveness for college graduates to care for our elders. More than 60 million Americans are family caregivers. They face challenges: Health suffers. Finances suffer. Families suffer. Aging Boomers will overwhelm our caregiving resources. Let’s create a Caregiver Corps, that would marry college debt forgiveness with programs that place recent graduates with families and aging services providers. Let’s bridge the generational divide that promotes ageism. Let’s do it!
One of my Twitter followers admonished me for my lack of detail. Without it, she said, no one would take me seriously. The idea is in its early stages, and would require thoughtful analysis and number-crunching by experts. But in the meantime, here’s the general idea for it.
Why We Need a Caregiver Corps
Several demographic trends are creating a future that will leave families and our beloved elders overwhelmed, exhausted, and bankrupted by the challenges of living with old age-that is, living past 80–with multiple chronic conditions that will, no matter what they do, kill them. In any given year, some 60 million Americans serve as family caregivers to another adult, someone who is either old, disabled, or both. (And millions more care for children and young adults who live with serious disabilities, and face even more challenges in terms of education, employment, and so on.)
These families will run square into a medical system that is not prepared to care for them in the ways the need most. These individuals might sometimes need rescue and cure—but they will more often need long-term supports and services, and help with things like transportation, hygiene, and food. And while they’ll have plenty of access to ICUs and new hips and knees—they will be shocked and disheartened by the costs of all the things they will need to pay for on their own: private-duty nurses, for instance, and home care; transportation and food and skilled nursing care.
Unless these families spend-down to become Medicaid beneficiaries or have adequate long-term care policies, their costs will be out of pocket. And those costs will be beyond reach for most middle-class Americans.
In the meantime, the social services agencies meant to serve aging Americans continue to 
be devastated by short-sighted budget cuts. Sequestration alone, one estimate suggests, will eliminate 800,000 Meals on Wheels in the State of Maryland.
And there will be few people to provide the hands-on care that these adults will need. The nation faces a profound shortage of people trained in geriatric care, from geriatricians to nurses to direct care workers. These shortages stem, in part, from the relatively low pay geriatricians earn, and the outright unlivable wage direct care workers receive. By one estimate, by 2030, when all of those Boomers are in their dotage, there will be one geriatrician for every 20,000 older adults.
A Caregiver Corps: Hope—and Help–for Us All
What’s a country to do? Launch a Caregiver Corps, a program modeled on similar valuable, successful, and long-lived efforts, such as the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, VISTA, and Teach for America. The program could recruit volunteers: high school graduates not trained for the workforce; college graduates facing a tough economy and huge undergraduate debt; and older adults, those healthy enough to want to remain in the workforce and contribute to others’ well-being.
Volunteers could sign up for a year or two. In exchange for their service, they could earn tuition credits to cover the cost of college; they could receive some degree of loan forgiveness, to lessen their burden of debt; they could be paid a stipend that acknowledges the value of their work. They could be assigned to community-based organizations that serve older adults, such as Area Agencies on Aging, non-profit health care institutions, social services agencies, and others.
While volunteers could offer enthusiasm, compassion, and insight, they could also learn the kinds of skills required to care for an older adult and his or her family. They could learn about the public policies that affect that care. They could acquire medical and nursing skills—the kind of skills family caregivers use routinely in their daily routine. They could be exposed to older people, and bridge the generational gap that splits our country on this demographic. In the end, they might even be inspired to pursue a career that features caring for one another.
That, it seems to me, is something Americans have always done best—and will have to do more, as we all reach our own old age. Developing people who have the skills, resources, and motivation to help us in our self-interest. And it is in theirs, too. Millennials face the highest unemployment of any group in the country, and finding ways to become marketable, employable adults is critical to their own security and future.
So, let’s try it. Let’s create a Caregiver Corps. Let’s get the Administration to think about it, and weigh in. It’s time, really, to move forward. We need 150 signatures to push the petition to the public pages of We the People. Please take a moment to add yours:
Janice Lynch Schuster specializes in writing about aging, caregiving, and end of life issues, and is a co-author of an award-winning book on the topic, Handbook for Mortals: Guidance for People Facing Serious Illness (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Legislators step up for EMC customers
Remember in the not so distant past when Cobb EMC customers had to take their co-op to court over lots of really dirty deals and violations of the bylaws? It wasn’t pretty, having to hire lawyers out of their own pockets while the co-op, which actually belongs to the customers, was ringing up some pretty big attorneys’ bills at the co-op’s expense to defending their actions that were in violation of the bylaws. And then there was that whole Cobb Energy “for-profit” spin-off that was a for-
profit for a very few people, but a big money loser for the co-op owner/members.
There’s nothing quite like opening the Atlanta Journal Constitution and seeing the GBI carrying boxes of records and documents out of the house of the CEO who is running the co-op you own.
It took years, but the customers won, and they, together with a fresh Board of Directors and a new CEO, are rebuilding their co-op to truly serve the interests of the members.
Some people would have put money on the other co-ops closely aligned with Cobb EMC to learn a lesson the easy way, and maybe try playing nice. It would have been easy too.
EMCs have nice community rooms where they could conduct their board meetings with the owner/members attending if they wanted too (Some co-ops in the Southwest even stream their meetings online to allow members hundreds of miles away to stay engaged).
They could post monthly financials on their web sites so members could stay current on the dollars and cents side of their co-op.
Georgia EMCs could choose to discuss and approve contracts in front of owner/members, just to keep everything above board (no pun intended) and transparent.
But Georgia’s EMCs didn’t choose to do that. In fact, some co-ops dug in their heels on closed-door operations.
At my co-op, Washington EMC, owner/members still have to fill out a form asking permission to attend a board meeting of the company we own. IF we are even allowed to attend, we are told when the Board should reach the very specific issue we would like to discuss. We have to wait outside in the lobby until we are ushered in, allowed to share our concern, and then ushered out of the meeting.
- You may own us, but we won’t let you in.
I guess, when you run a co-op behind closed doors, and make commitments on multi-billion dollar power plant contracts that didn’t involve competitive bids, or a pro forma review, or any independent market analysis that would make the project a good invest of the co-op owner/members dollars, you might not want the members to see how decisions actually get made.
That could change now. Representative Karla Drenner, D-Avondale Estates, has introduced H.B. 500, which would require power purchase agreements of five years or longer, to be reviewed by the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC).
Georgia Power customers know that rate increases and many other decisions impacting their power bills, must be reviewed by the PSC in an open meeting. If EMCs chose to play nice and open their meetings to the owner/members, just as many other co-ops have across the country, H.B. 500 might not be necessary.
H.B. 500 will provide consumer protection and public review of contracts to A LOT of Georgians. EMCs serve 73 percent of the land area in our state, and provide electricity to 50 percent of the people living in Georgia.
We deserve electric rate protection too.
But the time is very short to make this happen. Thursday, March 7, is Crossover Day in the General Assembly, and the bill must be voted on and passed in the House in order to move to the Senate.
You don’t have to be an EMC customer to call the person who represents you in the Georgia House. If you believe that all electric customers in Georgia deserve a fair chance at the lowest electric bills possible, call your House member today and ask them to vote YES on H.B. 500.
Be The Lorax
There is no time to wait.
Be The Lorax wherever you are.
White Stallion gallops away from proposed 1200 MW coal plant
Texas, a stalwart in using coal for electricity, has seen three proposed coal plants tank since the beginning of December. The Limestone 3 unit, which would have produced 745MW of power, went belly-up the first week of December. Developers spent six years trying to get that plant permitted and built before throwing in the towel.
In the last week of January Las Brisas Energy announced the cancellation of a 1320 MW proposed plant (the plant would have used a petroleum refinery product which is much like coal, called pet coke).
On Thursday, February 14, White Stallion Energy gave plant opponents the sweetest Valentine possible by announcing that it isn’t going to pursue its 1200MW coal plant any longer.
Did they quit because of a lack of water? Air quality concerns? The impact on the health of local citizens?
Nope. It was all about the bottom line.
White Stallion said in a very short press release, “the presently low price of natural gas has made the price of electricity from a new coal fired generator uncompetitive at this time”
That is COO speak for “this project is too expensive for us to make any money.”
Which brings us full circle to the questions people have been asking since January 2008: what makes Plant Washington such a good investment?
There is no pro-forma study to justify the project, in fact there is no independent information to support this multi-billion dollar plant,, and there never has been. Washington EMC officials have told us that much. They spent $1M of our money on a project which has no data or cost analysis to demonstrate that it is a sound way to spend our money (and it is our money since the co-op belongs to the members).
The Texas Observer’s coverage the day after White Stallion bucked its project summed up the present status of the coal industry with the article”Coal, an Obituary.” It included these observations and analyses:
- “coal stopped making economic sense. In short, coal got fracked.”
- “The story for White Stallion is similar too: local opposition that started small but grew (it certainly helped that the conservative county judge turned against it); major regulatory impasses for the company; and a bottom-line that had the bottom fall out of it.”
- “The White Stallion developers also didn’t do themselves any favors with ridiculous claims that the plant would lower electricity rates locally and that their traditional coal plant was a “clean coal” facility.”
- “It’s weird to say, but get used to it: Coal is expensive.”
The Texas Observer also forecasts, “Wind power is cheaper. Even solar is fixing to eat coal’s lunch, if it isn’t already doing so. El Paso Electric Company recently agreed to buy power from a New Mexico solar farm for a little under 6 cents per kilowatt-hour. A new coal plant costs twice as much.”
Perhaps the most damning statement about White Stallion came from Eva Malina, with the local No Coal Coalition. Malina said, “I think they thought that since we were a small rural community, they would not encounter opposition. They were wrong.”
A tribe of 40,000 strong
Washington County, where I live in Middle Georgia, is small, about 20,000 people living in a county with white clay, rolling hills, and woods filled with deer.
Yesterday I watched the area at the Washington Monument fill with twice as many people as those who call Washington County home to make their concerns about our natural resources, climate, and health, clear to the country.
I met fellow tribe members from Burlington College in Vermont on the DC Metro Sunday morning. The young man who chatted with me was wearing a tie, I suspect because the day was planned to be of historic proportions.
A father with his young son, perhaps four years old, wearing a Forward on Climate button, navigated Union Station. Travelers from New York and New Mexico jockeyed for hot coffee before setting out in the bitter cold for the Washington Monument.
On our way to the monument we walked past a small group of people wearing bright yellow t-shirts. 
They weren’t smiling, and they seemed to want to debate and record people rather than participate. Clearly they weren’t there because of passion, and their sad, plain flyer with pro fossil-fuel data identified them as the hired hands the industry pays and outfits for events which threaten their profits.
We streamed in with signs and banners. We came by car, train, bus, and plane. Great-grandchildren perched on the laps of their elders in wheelchairs. Children carried cheerful signs with bright suns and flowers, lettered in the distinct print young children use.
We bounced on our toes to warm our feet. Couples held gloved hands. Before long we were a sea of fleece and down jackets.
And we marched, this river of people from across North America. Women from First Nations walked in front while men towards the back kept a steady beat on a large handmade drum. So many people, so many colors, shapes, ages, and reasons for being there to say, together, that the old ways must change.
We walked away from the yellow t-shirted few, greeting the people around us while we chanted and smiled. I walked with two women from Canada, then students from Earlham College and Appalachian State. New Yorkers opposed to fracking wore their signs over their chests and backs. Three men carried wooden numbers on tall stakes spelling out 350.
We cheered and chanted in front of the White House, calling for the President to make good on his words about Climate Change and how we will fuel our country. He had escaped the bitter cold for a weekend in Florida, but we were sure our voices were heard.
Our message was clear and our voices were strong. We made history yesterday standing shoulder to shoulder for the future we want for the youngest who were among us.