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With almost any power generation project, there’s a lot of NIMBY-ing. (Or at least accusations of it).
NIMBY means Not In My Backyard. The idea is that a community favors an idea like a new power plant or grain silo, but opposes having it built–literally or figuratively–in their backyard.
This piece on Boing Boing points out a new trend with NIMBY and wind power. It seems that plans to build wind turbines often face opposition, which planners write of as NIMBY-ing, even though it’s actually good old-fashioned naysaying. People who favor wind power don’t tend to mind having turbines nearby. People who oppose the idea don’t want turbines in their backyard, or anywhere.
In other words, what we call NIMBY is less about what people do or don’t want in their backyards, and more about people in and out of the community using the backyard as a flashpoint for national opposition. If you’re in favor of wind, you’re likely to be in favor of it in your community. If you oppose wind, you’ll oppose it in your community. But the specific location of the wind turbines isn’t really a huge factor in your decisions.
Hey folks, it’s Laura Ellis, with SoA. We’re back to live shows this week after some time away for the holiday, and here’s what’s coming up.
To keep us in the holiday spirit, today we’ll be talking today about bourbon! Bourbon historian Mike Veach joins us, along with local food & drink mavens Susan Reigler and Joy Perrino, who co-authored The Kentucky Bourbon Cocktail Book.
Tomorrow we’re tackling a somewhat more nebulous topic: the concept of justice. We’ll be looking at it from a philosophical perspective, with political philosopher and Harvard professor Michael Sandel. He’s in town with the Kentucky Author Forum to talk about his book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?
We all complain about it – and these guys get the brunt of the complaining. Meteorologists Jay Cardosi and John Belski join us on Wednesday to give us an overview of what we can expect weather-wise this winter, and into next year.
Bordeaux, France; Tuscany, Italy; Napa Valley, California… Paducah, Kentucky? That’s right, there are more than 50 wineries in our own Commonwealth, producing around 200,000 gallons of vino each year. On Thursday we’ll learn more about Kentucky’s wineries and vineyards.
Then on Friday, we’ll round things out with our State of the News show, and invite you to comment on this week’s stories and headlines.
Here are some Senate race updates…
First, an explanation of the split between Republican Rand Paul and the National Republican Senatorial Committee from the CJ. The argument is over an NRSC endorsement in the primary.
“The NRSC will not endorse in the primary, and I think most Kentuckians will welcome the fact that they’ll be able to make their decision on the merits of the candidates and not on undue outside influence,” Paul, a Bowling Green ophthalmologist, said in an interview.
Paul said he believed the committee was “hedging its bets” because it no longer believes that Secretary of State Trey Grayson is the odds-on favorite to win.
But Brian Walsh, a spokesman for the committee, said in an interview that Bumps didn’t say what Paul claimed he did.
Although the senatorial committee hasn’t endorsed anyone in the race, it’s generally assumed that the group is backing Grayson.
In September, 24 senators — including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Sen. John Cornyn, the committee’s chairman — held a fundraiser for Grayson at the group’s headquarters.
“Randy did speak with Mr. Paul,” Walsh said. “But what Mr. Paul told you was not entirely accurate. What Randy told him was that the NRSC does not anticipate making any endorsements in the race but that we reserve the right to do so.”
Next, Al Cross‘ CJ column is all about mountaintop removal’s role in the senate race, particularly in the Democratic primary.
Coal jobs pay well, so they contribute more on average to Kentucky’s economy, and the industry contributes through its sales and purchases. But the available data for mining in Kentucky (mostly coal, but also including limestone and more minor materials) show that its share of the gross state product isn’t much greater than coal’s share of jobs and has gone down in the last decade. Last year it was 1.45 percent.
At the same time, coal has never been more controversial. In addition to climate change, there is increasing concern about effects of the mercury and other pollutants it contains, and the impact of strip mining on the Cumberland-Allegheny Plateau. “Mountaintop removal” has become the generic if often inaccurate name for most surface mining in Central Appalachia, and it has become a catchphrase and rallying point.
Every five years, the Kentucky Environmental Education Council pays for a survey that asks Kentuckians to name the state’s top environmental problems. Ten years ago and five years ago, the top three problems were water pollution, air pollution and waste management, in that order. This year, the top two were the same, but there was a new No. 3: mountaintop removal or strip mining in general.
The Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development have teamed up to form the Federal Interagency Partnership for Sustainable Communities.
This EPA-DOT-HUD FIPSC is more than alphabet soup. It’s a program designed to enhance suburbs, making them less car-centric and easier to travel in and around.
What does this have to do with Lousiville? It’s coming here.
Two study areas were chosen for their level of development on Louisville’s suburban fringe and for their adjacency to the planned City of Parks initiative around the Floyds Fork stream corridor which is expected to draw new development. According to Metro Louisville, “Fern Creek, an unincorporated area just on the edge of the Floyds Fork area, presents a suburban context where a ‘business as usual’ pattern of growth threatens the community’s quality of life and long-term livability.”
The process of retrofitting existing suburban areas isn’t going to be easy. The area is already largely developed and is split in two by a major Interstate highway. The city won’t be able to force existing development to change, but instead seeks to make recommendations on how growth and redevelopment happens in a “new suburban paradigm.”
While the study will emphasize the Bardstown Road corridor in Fern Creek, strategies will also be created to guide the largely rural Billtown Road corridor. Combined, both areas represent about 2,000 acres and “possess the greatest potential for creating compact, mixed-use centers,” according to Metro Louisville. Strategies developed for these areas can later be adopted for other suburban areas around the city.
I’m anxious to watch this all unfold.
When we hear about job creation, it’s often in sectors that require a workforce with college education. There are jobs being created in other sectors, but the gap in education requirements for new jobs is causing problems in Washington.
Citing the work of George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis, Haynes notes that “the District has a higher proportion of undereducated, low-skilled people who have been most vulnerable to job cuts,” and so it stands to reason that “many of the new, higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs in the city are going to people in the suburbs” of Maryland and Virginia. Eagle-eyed readers of the Post business section might recall asimilarly underplayed story from earlier this month, which found that DC’s rarely functional government has been stoking this urban skills gap by failing to direct recipients of welfare assistance to programs upgrading job skills and offering counsel on job search strategies—even though such referrals are more or less mandatory u
This post comes to us from WFPL Environmental Reporter Kristin Espeland Gourlay.
Well, some of you might know these facts about the traditional American bird, but for those of you who don’t, here are some tidbits:
- The bird you’re eating now didn’t exist until around the 1940s. According to the USDA, most turkeys in the 1930s had dark plumage, narrower breasts, and weighed between 18 and 25 pounds. But a survey was conducted showing that consumers wanted a turkey with more breast meat, as well as one that could more easily fit in the refrigerator. So, the USDA began a breeding program and, by 1947, introduced a new breed called the Beltsville Small White. Consumers demanded still more breast meat, and so the Broad Breasted White was created. By 1965, it dominated the market.
- Broad breasted whites are so broad breasted they can’t mate. Producers have to artificially inseminate them.
- More than 300 million turkeys are raised in the U.S. every year, most of them broad breasted whites.
- The average size of a turkey has grown by more than 4% every year; today the average weight is more than 28 pounds.
- Over the past few decades, the number of turkey producers has dropped more than 30% as operations consolidate.
- In the early 1970s, there were barely more than a million wild turkeys left in the U.S. Today, there are more than 7 million.
Bon appetit!
Two years ago, the Parisian (Paris, France, not Paris, KY) government purchased more than 20 thousand bikes. These bikes were made available as part of a low-cost public program to help people get around. Now more than four fifths of those bikes have been damaged beyond use.
Bruno Marzloff, a sociologist who specializes in transportation, said, “One must relate this to other incivilities, and especially the burning of cars,” referring to gangs of immigrant youths burning cars during riots in the suburbs in 2005.
He said he believed there was social revolt behind Vélib’ vandalism, especially for suburban residents, many of them poor immigrants who feel excluded from the glamorous side of Paris.
“It is an outcry, a form of rebellion; this violence is not gratuitous,” Mr. Marzloff said. “There is an element of negligence that means, ‘We don’t have the right to mobility like other people, to get to Paris it’s a huge pain, we don’t have cars, and when we do, it’s too expensive and too far.’ ”
I remember the bike rental from the 2008 Idea Festival. Bikes were available for free and could be used all day by anyone downtown, as long as the bikes were returned by the end of the day. Do you think America’s social mobility would keep a permanent bike rental from suffering the same fate as the French program? Would you use a free bike downtown?
If you think your dining companions can handle it, try recanting this tale from the Moth’s story slam. It’s about a man who hunted kangaroos…and like everything heard at the Moth, it’s true.
Does the title have your attention? Let me explain.
While it’s not always a surefire predictor, the unemployment rate among minorities in American has–in recent times–set the trend for overall unemployment, which follows the minority’s trend months later.
And now the Washington Post is reporting that the unemployment rate for black men is at Great Depression levels.
The jobless rate for young black men and women is 30.5 percent. For young blacks — who experts say are more likely to grow up in impoverished racially isolated neighborhoods, attend subpar public schools and experience discrimination — race statistically appears to be a bigger factor in their unemployment than age, income or even education. Lower-income white teens were more likely to find work than upper-income black teens, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, and even blacks who graduate from college suffer from joblessness at twice the rate of their white peers.
Young black women have an unemployment rate of 26.5 percent, while the rate for all 16-to-24-year-old women is 15.4 percent.
