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Amish help neighbors left without electricity
Roger Alford, Associated Press via Courier-Journal
When the wind died down and the ice storm had passed, Joe Stutzman gathered his spare lanterns and stepped out of his Amish farmhouse to lend them to his modern-living neighbors.
“I feel sorry for my neighbors who were used to electricity and all of a sudden didn’t have it,” Stutzman said. “I know that must be hard for them.”
Hundreds of thousands of people in Kentucky were without electricity for their lights, furnaces, ovens and refrigerators after the killer storm hit more than a week ago. Some spots might not get power back for weeks.
But Kentucky’s Amish have been living that way all their lives. And when the disaster struck, they generously lent a hand to their non-Amish neighbors and showed them how it’s done.
… “Those folks are very good at sustaining themselves,” said Master Sgt. Paul Mouilleseaux, a National Guard spokesman.
Stutzman, 40, his wife and their seven children were secure in their toasty, two-story home amid corn and soybean fields and swampy stands of cypress in Western Kentucky.
“We paid it no attention,” Stutzman said Tuesday of the storm, relaxing in a handmade rocker as a wood stove across the room radiated heat on a windy morning with temperatures in the low 20s.
(6 February 2009)
Obama Orders New Rules to Raise Energy Efficiency
John M. Broder, New York Times
President Obama ordered the Energy Department on Thursday to immediately draft long-overdue standards to make a variety of appliances and light bulbs more energy efficient.
Over the last three decades, Congress has demanded stricter efficiency standards on 30 categories of products, as varied as residential air-conditioners and industrial boilers. But successive administrations have failed to write regulations to enforce the laws, even when ordered to by the courts.
[Mr. Obama] said the new standards would cut energy use and reduce emissions of the heat-trapping gases that scientists blame for global warming.
(5 February 2009)
Why Shovel-Ready Infrastructure is Wrong (Right Now)
Erik Sofge, Popular Mechanics
The term “shovel-ready”—as in, infrastructure projects that are ready or almost ready to begin—has become a favorite of policy makers in recent weeks. As the Senate gets ready to vote on a stimulus bill, it looks like the idea has stuck: The latest bill gives only projects that are able to start construction within 90 days eligibility for funding from the $90 billion set aside for infrastructure. Here is why the shovel-ready mandate could make the infrastructure crisis worse.
… The programs that would meet the bill’s 90-day restriction are, for the most part, an unappealing mix of projects that were either shelved after being fully designed and engineered, and have since become outmoded or irrelevant, or projects with limited scope and ambition. No one’s building a smart electric grid or revamping a water system on 90 days notice. The best example of a shovel-ready project, and what engineers believe could become the biggest recipient of the transportation-related portion of the bill’s funding, is road resurfacing—important maintenance work, but not a meaningful way to rein in a national infrastructure crisis. “In developing countries, there are roads that are so bad, they create congestion, because drivers are constantly forced to slow down,” says David Levinson, an associate professor in the University of Minnesota’s civil engineering department. “That’s not the case here. If the road’s a little bit rougher, drivers will feel it, but that’s not going to cause you to go any slower. So the economic benefit of those projects is pretty low.”
… Even if the engineers are wrong, and a new wave of smoothly paved roads and bridges does somehow bolster the economy, politicians will eventually have to come to terms with the dangerous legacy of shovel-ready thinking, which has helped shape the current infrastructure crisis. The 90-day stipulation rules out projects already under construction. And in order to begin replacing or overhauling one of the country’s thousands of structurally deficient bridges, transportation officials might be forced to resort to hastily planned projects.
(5 February 2009)
The Fight Against Big Coal Hits the Kansas State Legislature, with National Repercussions.
Simran Sethi, Huffington Post
On October 18, 2007, Kansas made history. Health and Environmental Secretary Roderick Bremby made the landmark decision to deny permits for two new 700 MW coal-fired power plants proposed by Sunflower Electric, on the grounds that carbon emissions from the plants would negatively impact health. “After careful consideration of my responsibility to protect the public health and environment from actual, threatened or potential harm from air pollution, I have decided to deny the Sunflower Electric Power Corporation application for an air quality permit,” Bremby said in the official press statement.
Let’s be clear, this decision was a game-changer. In his ruling, Bremby stated it would be “irresponsible” to ignore the impacts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases on global warming. It was the first time that climate change was cited in such a context, setting a precedent for other decisions of its kind across the nation. In response, Sunflower proposed three bills to the state legislature in 2008 that would have allowed the plants to be built, but all three were vetoed by Governor Kathleen Sebelius. Now, with the state legislature back in session, Sunflower is continuing their fight to expand the reach of big coal.
… Because of high disapproval rates around the building of new plants, the predominantly Republican legislature has been wary of casting a strictly pro-coal vote. But according to Scott Allegrucci of the Great Plains Alliance for Clean Energy (GPACE), Bill 2182 “is cleverly written to allow some legislators who sustained the 2008 vetoes to vote for the coal plants this time, while giving them the ability to tell their constituents that they only voted for ‘regulatory certainty,’ not coal plants.” In Wednesday’s discussion of the bill, proponent Amy Blankenbiller of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce stated, “We are not here today to talk about environmental regulation, but to talk about due process, regulatory process.”
Call it “due process” if you want, but the truth is that the bill’s environmental repercussions are huge. What would it mean for Kansas if the bill is passed? Scott Allegrucci says, “It would certainly force the Holcomb plants to be given air quality permits; it would force KDHE to file action in local courts county-by-county if it wished to enforce federal Clean Air Act findings or rulings; and it would certainly open Kansas to future attempts by ANY polluting industry that wished to secure air quality permits and could afford to buy enough advertising or enough legislative votes to get their way.”
And the rest of the nation would lose the first real stand of public heath officials and government against one of the nation’s most polluting industries.
(5 February 2009)
