Category: Environment
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Saving Virginia’s Old Growth Forests One Tree Stand at a Time
by James A. Bacon This is my kind of environmentalism: The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) has purchased more than 800 acres in Giles and Bland counties to preserve two old-growth forest communities dominated by northern red oak and chestnut oak. The old-growth communities exist in a “large matrix of nearly unbroken forest,”…
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CO2 Taxes, Gas Rationing Poll Badly With Voters
By Steve Haner The Transportation and Climate Initiative plan to tax and ration motor fuels suffered a major setback just before Christmas, when eight of the eleven states considering it decided not to move forward in 2021. Less than two weeks earlier, advocates had released polling that claimed to show overwhelming popularity for the idea.
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2020 Was To Be Year of Climate Doom
By Steve Haner So, let’s take another trip down Climate Catastrophe Memory Lane. Maybe 2020 was not such a bad year after all. It was certainly better than it was supposed to be. The pandemic might have been just a footnote to Climate Doom. In 1987, the official Jeremiah of the movement, NASA’s James Hansen,…
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A New Fad: Bashing Offshore Wind Turbines
By Peter Galuszka Offshore wind power is becoming a whipping boy even as the technology involved becomes more advanced and its costs go down. Northwestern Europe is offshore wind headquarters globally and countries such as the United Kingdom have wholeheartedly embraced it. Yet some critics, some of whom are supported financially by the fossil fuel…
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A Giant Wind Turbine, but Not for Virginia
by Dick Hall-Sizemore The issue of wind energy is pretty much out of my field of knowledge, much less expertise. I follow the discussion on this blog with a lot of interest. In this vein, I found a story in today’s New York Times most interesting. It is about a giant turbine that GE is…
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Virginia and Other States Pass on Carbon Tax Pact
by Steve Haner The organizers of the Transportation and Climate Initiative announced Monday that only four of the twelve jurisdictions involved have agreed to move forward and implement the carbon tax on motor fuels, and Virginia is not one of them. Not yet. The 2021 Virginia General Assembly could consider legislation to join the interstate…
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Tufts Study Projects Major TCI Carbon Taxes
By Steve Haner Monday the organizers of the Transportation and Climate Initiative, a carbon tax and rationing regime for Virginia motor fuels, will be announcing details of the underlying interstate compact, according to media reports. The media in Virginia has been disinterested in the issue, but the debate is raging in New England. The Boston…
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The Virginia City Boondoggle
By Peter Galuszka Back in 2007, Dominion Energy was touting its new hybrid generating plant near St. Paul in Southwest Virginia as the wave of the future because it would burn coal and wood using advanced fluidized bed technologies. But for eight months this year, the 624-megawatt Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center operated at only…
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EPA: PM 2.5 At Current Levels is No Threat
By Steve Haner “Everything is a poison, nothing is a poison. It is the dose that makes the poison” – Paracelsus (1493-1541 AD) A micron is a tiny thing. A grain of beach sand is about 90 microns, and a human hair 50 to 70 microns in diameter. In the coming session of the General…
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Does a $9 Billion Carbon Tax Get Your Attention?
by Steve Haner The 2021 General Assembly is now six weeks away, with the holidays in between. We know no more about the coming Northam Administration proposal to impose a carbon tax and rationing scheme on our motor fuels than we did months ago. Keeping you uninformed may be part of the plan. All we…
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The Lies in “Hillbilly Elegy”
By Peter Galuszka A 2016 memoir by J.D. Vance, a former Ohio resident, drew praise from conservatives for its laud of self-reliance and disciple and criticism from others for its long string of debunked clichés about people from the Central Appalachians. The book, “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,”…
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Behind Dominion’s Shift to Renewables
By Peter Galuszka Ever wonder why Dominion Energy found religion and announced a major shift to renewable energy? The answer is that modern, high technology businesses want it and the Richmond-based utility wants to respond to their desires. This one of the themes in this recent cover story I did for Style Weekly that explores…
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Carbon Tax Advocates Who Lost in November
Editor’s Note: A cautionary tale as the 2021 Virginia General Assembly prepares to debate another major carbon tax? By Paul D. Craney One of the most overlooked stories on Election Day was the defeat of pro-carbon tax politicians across the nation and here in New England. The most notable carbon tax proponent to seek office in…
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GOP Group Seeks Repeal of 2020 Energy Omnibus
By Steve Haner A Virginia GOP activist group aimed at suburban voters will be advocating repeal of the Virginia Clean Economy Act by the 2021 General Assembly, seeking to return a herd of cows that is well out of the barn and busting down the pasture fence. The Suburban Virginia Republican Coalition has produced a…
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TCI: Taxing the Poor to Benefit the Rich
By Steve Haner “I think TCI is just taxing poor people so that we can subsidize rich people’s electric cars.” So said New Jersey’s Maria Lopez-Nuñez, Deputy Director, Organizing and Advocacy for the Ironbound Community Corporation. She was speaking during an online seminar September 29 organized by Transportation and Climate Initiative advocates. That particular comment…