Here’s who voted which way when Sabal Trail lost in a landslide against its easements to drill under our Withlacoochee River and Okapilco Creek and other rivers and creeks in Georgia.
Thanks to Bentley, Harden, Houston, Pirkle, Powell, Rynders, Sharper, Shaw, Spencer, and Watson for voting Nay against that pipeline river-drilling boondoggle.
And Carter, Corbett, and LaRiccia, well, thanks for listening, I guess.
I’ve added Continue reading
Update 2016-03-22 10:30PM: The vote tally.
As reported by Georgia Sierra Club:
Thank you to everyone who contacted a legislator about SR 954 and their concerns about the Sabal Trail pipeline easements. The house voted down the bill 128-34 this afternoon!!! CONGRATULATIONS!
Thanks to everyone, especially Georgia Water Coalition, Georgia Sierra Club, Flint Riverkeeper, Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, everybody else who helped, and of course all WWALS members and everyone else who called their state reps.
There still more you can do to stop Sabal Trail. See the op-ed blog post of today. Continue reading
Update 2016-02-22: We all won by a landslide in the Georgia House! There’s more to do tomorrow until Sabal Trail is ended for good; see below.
Please call your Georgia state representative and ask them to vote No today on SR 954 that would give Sabal Trail easements to drill under our rivers. Here’s why:
John S. Quarterman, VDT, 2016-03-22, Still possible to keep Sabal Trail out,
After two years going to Sabal Trail open houses and FERC scoping meetings, filing e-comments, guiding them to the river crossings and a legal hearing in Jasper, FERC still tells us customers for Spectra Energy from Houston, Texas, constitute a need that outweighs local property rights, environmental destruction, and hazards to our Withlacoochee and Suwannee rivers and the Floridan Aquifer, and to taxes, life, and limb.
Yet Georgia is the fastest-growing U.S. solar market, while solar Continue reading
Approved 12 June 2013 by unanimous vote of the WWALS board, Dave has mailed a signed copy to the Georgia Public Service Commission, and I will go read it to the PSC Tuesday morning at 10 AM 18 June 2013, at their hearing about
Docket 36498, Georgia Power Company’s 2013 Integrated Resource Plan and Application for Decertification of Various Unitsand
Docket 36499, Application for the Certification of Amended Demand Side Management Plan
Y’all come! -jsq
From: WWALS Watershed Coalition, Inc.
3338 Country Club Road #L336
Valdosta, GA 31605
12 June 2013To: Georgia
Public Service Commission
244 Washington Street, SW
Atlanta GA, 30334-9052
Dear Public Service Commissioners and Staff,
The recent rains have swollen our blackwater rivers, Withlacoochee, Willacoochee, Alapaha, and Little, under our longleaf pines and Spanish-moss-covered oaks, and filled up the tea-colored tannin waters in our frog-singing pocosin cypress swamps here in central South Georgia. But that was only a dent in our protracted drought that ranges from mild to extreme, with projections not much better.
We do not need more traditional big baseload power plants gulping down our river or aquifer water when solar and wind power use far less, and those renewables are now at grid parity with coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
Power plants are thirsty, as the Union of Concerned Scientists pointed out in a 2011 report, “Freshwater Use by U.S. Power Plants: Electricity’s Thirst for a Precious Resource”.
Much of the water used to cool power plants evaporates, and is Continue reading