Yubanet: Blue Lead Withdraws Appeal
Yubanet today reports that Blue Lead Mine has withdrawn its formal appeal to the Board of Supervisors to overturn the Planning Commission’s denial of vested right to mine.
As you may recall, the Planning Commission decided to deny Blue Lead’s application for vested right to mine after hearing significant testimony from the general public in opposition to that application.
Yubanet quotes Blue Lead’s July 27th letter to the Board:
After meetings with County Counsel and the Planning Director, Blue Lead Gold Mining, LLC wishes to notify the Nevada County Board of Supervisors that it will not pursue the pending appeal, and will instead continue working cooperatively with County Planning Staff to accomplish Blue Lead’s goals for its property. As such, please accept this letter as Blue Lead’s notice to the Board of Supervisors that it is officially withdrawing its appeal, and will instead continue pursuing the permitting process with the County.
Blue Lead will now need to resume its application for regular permits with the Planning Department. Its application — started last fall — was incomplete at the time Blue Lead changed its strategy to seek vested right to mine. Presumably it will now need to complete its application as a first step.
A related footnote: Today I heard an advertisement on KVMR for Downey Brand, the Roseville law firm employing Braiden Chadwick, the attorney who represented Blue Lead in its application for vested right to mine. The ad pitched Downey Brand as serving the local business community.
Possibly Downey Brand is hoping to represent more vested right claims in our county?
PG&E Small-Scale Solar Utility in Nevada County?
Here Chris Johns, President of PG&E, talks about the utility’s new 2-megawatt Vaca-Dixon solar array and how it could fit into a strategy of using smaller arrays, closer to transmission and customers.
The EPA has already designated the Idaho-Maryland Mine site as suitable for utility-scale solar. With Emgold’s continuing prospects looking bleaker, the city of Grass Valley should start exploring viable alternatives such as this kind of solar facility.
Great Article About Grass Valley in Today’s SacBee
Today’s Sacramento Bee featured an excellent article about the growing charms of Grass Valley.
Your Guide: You want nice place, nice people? Try Grass Valley
By Rick Kushman
rkushman@sacbee.com
Published: Sunday, Jul. 25, 2010 – 12:00 amGRASS VALLEY – Everyone is so nice here. Not goober-sweet, insulin-shock nice. Just friendly and open and, you know, nice.
After two days of hitting this amiability everywhere – in the restaurants, the bookstores, the shops, the wine tasting rooms, the saloon at the Holbrooke Hotel, the Holiday Inn Express, even the Safeway at the bottom of the old town – I had to ask about it.
After breakfast at Tofanelli’s, a popular bistro with a killer patio (and 100-plus omelet choices), two of my servers were outside on a break. So I asked, nicely of course: “What is it with this town?”
“Everybody knows each other almost anyplace you go,” said Melenie Teehee. “So we just treat everyone like a neighbor.”
…
Read full article here.
DOUBLE-CLICK FOR GRASS VALLEY SLIDESHOW
A Kick Ass Movie, Followed by Our Comfort Restaurant
We had a great date today: A matinee at Sutton Cinemas, where we watched Angelina Jolie kick ass in Salt. A lot of fun so long as you suspend your disbelief. As one of my American literature professors used to say, “fiction depends on the willing suspension of disbelief.”
There was a lot of disbelief to suspend in Salt, a movie originally offered to Tom Cruise, who turned it down out of concern that it was too much like Mission Impossible. I’d probably be complaining about the lame retro-Soviet plot if it had been Tom Cruise, but it was great fun watching Angelina Jolie kick serious butt.
Afterward we shared a plate of Penne Chicken Dijon and a glass of chilled green tea with mint (two straws) at Cirino’s at Main Street, our favorite restaurant, while listening to Billie Holiday sing “Good Morning Heartache,” and to some vintage Sinatra and Steve Tyrell on their Sirius channel.
An altogether happy day … an adrenaline storm followed by some mellow dining and music.
By the Time I Grabbed the Camera, They’d Stopped Nursing
The fawns bounded down toward the house where the doe was grazing and began nursing immediately, but by the time I was able to grab the camera they’d stopped.
Nevada City Farmer’s Market Bustling Despite Heat
I expected the turnout to be low at the Nevada City Farmer’s Market this morning because of the excessive heat, but I was wrong. It was bustling as usual.
Some good folks from a local Baptist Church set up a booth for the sole purpose — or perhaps the “soul purpose” — of handing out cups of cold water to passersby, and they had lots of takers.
We brought along our portable cooler on wheels, a trick we hit on recently after the weather turned hot. We purchased the cooler for temporary use the day our refrigerator crapped out back in 2007, and it has been sitting in the garage every since. With the cooler, we are able to get home with all our market produce still crisp and fresh.
Chris Crockett, known to us from a number of Off Broadstreet productions, was in fine mettle this morning in the Market Plaza, singing everything from Rocket Man to Puff the Magic Dragon (by request of a toddler). You can catch him currently in Off Broadstreet’s Summer of Love. By the way, we hear that Sue LeGate does a spectacular send-up of Janis Joplin in that production.
Chris Crockett, Nevada City Farmer's Market, July 17, 2010
Here’s Chris singing the title song from Off Broadstreet’s “Recession,The Musical.”
More Signs That Peak Oil Thinking Has Become Mainstream
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A new report, produced jointly by Lloyd’s of London and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (aka Chatham House), concludes that “we are heading towards a global oil supply crunch and price spike … companies which are able to plan for and take advantage of this new energy reality will increase both their resilience and competitiveness. Failure to do so could lead to expensive and potentially catastrophic consequences.”
The report focuses on business risk perspectives, and doesn’t elaborate at length on the dire social and civilizational consequences of Peak Oil. It does note, however, the increasing difficulty of oil extraction, a fact much on everyone’s mind in the wake of BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil-spill disaster:
“Much of the world’s energy infrastructure lies in areas that will be increasingly subject to severe weather events caused by climate change. On top of this, extraction is increasingly taking place in more severe environments such as the Arctic and ultra-deep water. For energy investors this means long-term planning based on a changing – rather than a stable climate. For energy users, it means greater likelihood of loss of power for industry and fuel supply disruptions.”
Most writings on Peak Oil emphasize the looming catastrophe of massive price increases in ubiquitous oil-based products as well as untenable shipping cost increases in a global economy dependent on cheap transport.
The ultimate result of Peak Oil, then, would be an unwinding of globalism and a return to primary dependence on local economies.
When I first understood the significance of Peak Oil, I was frightened, and began to think about stocking up on food and other emergency supplies.
In time, though, I came to realize that the only real security is working in community. At the neighborhood level, it does make sense to stock up on food and other emergency supplies (for instance, see the Food Readiness Project). It also makes sense to share other tools.
Our focus must be on re-building our local communities to be more resilient, self-sufficient and sustainable.
Nevada County is fortunate to have among its citizens a group of people who have been thinking about the Peak Oil problem for years, and are working to prepare for and mitigate its most dire consequences. I speak, of course, about the Alliance for a Post-Petroleum Local Economy (A.P.P.L.E.) and its Sustainability Center.
Spend a few minutes perusing the websites for those two organizations and you will notice a wonderful thing: both are primarily focused on positive local solutions and much less on the looming disasters in the global economy.
In the years ahead, we will have more and more reason to be grateful for the work of this small but rapidly growing local cadre of concerned citizens.
The following is a 2-minute 49-second video summary of the Lloyd’s-Chatham House report by one of the authors, Antony Froggatt, Senior Research Fellow, Energy, Environment and Development Programme for Chatham House.
More Peak Oil Resources
Peak Moment TV
Produced by Nevada County videographers and A.P.P.L.E founders Janaia Donaldson and Robyn Mallgren, Peak Moment shines a bright light on local sustainability projects in North America. After several years, this series now represents an amazing body of work and is increasingly recognized nationwide as an important contribution to the Peak Oil literature.
Energy Bulletin
A reader’s digest of the best writing on Peak Oil: Writers such as Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, Sharon Astyk, Bill McKibben and many others.
Post Carbon Institute
Peak Oil Think Tank and activist organization. Conferences. Papers. Books. Community organizing.
ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas).
Think Tank and research institute. Conferences. Papers. Charts.
The Oil Drum
Online journal. “Discussions about energy and our future.”
Life After the Oil Crash
Online journal and discussion group.
The Oil Age Poster
“A Brilliant Tool for Examining the Geologic Realities and Social Ramifications of the Modern World’s Most Prized Resource.”
NCTV’s Anti-AGW Content Surprised Me Today
I was surprised today to catch the tail-end of a short video on NCTV expressing the fringe view that global warming is not caused by humans. The video also promoted a book called “Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years,” by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery.
The video, featuring a talk by Avery, is not in NCTV’s schedule but was shown just before the beginning of today’s channel 17 broadcast about noon of the Nevada County Board of Supervisors’ Special Meeting of July 6th.
I called NCTV staff and learned that this video is one of a large collection of short videos on file at the studio that are used as “fillers.” Short fillers allow NCTV staff to fill gaps between regularly-scheduled programs as they occur from time-to-time.
Quite properly, NCTV is “blind” to the content of its programming, precisely so that it will reflect the diversity of views in the community at large. NCTV staff told me that they have also run other programs on global warming.
This suggests to me that anyone in our community who wants to promote the mainstream view, anthropogenic (or “man-made”) global warming (AGW), would do well to offer some short content — preferably under 20 minutes — to NCTV to include in their filler library for future use.
Here’s a short 3-minute excerpt from the piece I caught today on channel 17, the government channel:
What Nevada County Could Do With A Regional High-Speed Network
If you doubt the value of a local high-speed fiber-optic network, consider what the people of Ten Sleep, Wyoming (population 300) have done with theirs:
New global outsourcing hub — Wyoming?
When it comes to call centers filled with English-speaking employees, India likely comes to mind. Not a tiny town in Wyoming called Ten Sleep, population about 300.
What Ten Sleep has is not, exactly, a call center. Instead, the town is home to a teaching center that is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There, American teachers provide real-time video English lessons to thousands of students in classrooms across Asia via high-speed fiber optic networks.
Ten Sleep isn’t the only small Wyoming town that has a center: So does Cody, Powell, Lovell and nearly a half dozen other communities across the state. They’re owned by Eleutian Technology, a company that is using the internet to bring jobs once outsourced to cheap labor in the East to back to unemployed Americans in the West.
Read full story here.
When the time is right, maybe we should invite Eleutian Technology to Nevada County.
This is just one example of the countless opportunities afforded by a high-speed fiber-optic regional backbone.
Last Day for Early-Bird Celtic Festival Tickets
Today is the last day to buy Early-Bird Tickets for the Celtic Festival in October.
Click image below to buy them now.
Here’s a group you can see firsthand at this year’s festival: Leahy.
Like many of the groups featured at the festival, they pass my “goose pimple” test.
