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At Solve Climate, Autumn Spanne writes Tribes Working to Buck Unemployment with Green Jobs:
| Solar installation at Jemez Pueblo
| When Dillon Toya started his senior year at Jemez Pueblo's Walatowa Charter High School in northern New Mexico last fall, he wanted his senior project to combine the teachings of his ancestors with cutting-edge building design.
Six months later, the 18-year-old high school graduate and aspiring architect had designed a new energy-efficient high school building that he hopes will one day replace the portable trailers where he and his 66 classmates studied. The proposed building, designed to resemble traditional Pueblo dwellings of adobe and wood, includes solar panels to generate electricity, a solar-powered heating system and water recycling.
Toya’s project reflects one of many ways that impoverished Jemez Pueblo is building strong connections between its education system and its fledgling green energy industry. And it’s not alone. Jemez Pueblo is an example of a larger movement among native groups to promote a green sector that they hope will chip away at a problem that has plagued their communities for years: high unemployment. The jobless rate in native communities is often several times the national average.
Next spring, Jemez plans to break ground on a 3.5-megawatt commercial-scale solar installation that would be the largest on tribal lands. It is expected to bring construction jobs and at least two permanent jobs to the pueblo, said Kaufman. |
While some tribes have put solar installations on individual houses and other buildings, including casinos, the Jemez project will be the first tribal solar operation in the States to feed into the electrical grid. Estimated cost is $22 million. The 14,850 solar panels will occupy 30 acres of desert and generate $1 million a year in income. Among the projects the tribe hopes to fund are upgrades of its drinking water and wastewater treatment systems.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:
Can I ask a quick little something, since it just came up on CNN yet again? Where on earth is this idea that Rudy Giuliani has "strong national security credentials" coming from?
Rudy Giuliani has essentially no national security credentials to speak of. He was mayor of New York before and during 9/11, yes. Before that day, he was responsible for two critical screwups that greatly hindered the city's disaster response: the incompatibility of emergency responders' radios, and the decision to place the city's emergency response command center in the World Trade Center, one of the highest-profile targets in New York, and one already known to be a terrorist target. During that day, his grand accomplishment was to walk around at the scene of the disaster, making sure he appeared before every television camera that presented itself. And after 9/11, he was placed as a member of the Iraq Study Group, where never attended even one meeting and left after two months in order to more freely pursue his presidential campaign.
So Mayor Rudy Giuliani's primary "national security credentials" would appear to be his capability for simple bipedal motion in televised news footage. |