Category: Environment
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Pollution Control Tax Break Not An Incentive
Not every tax policy decision should be made or measured on whether it stimulates more economic activity and thus more taxable revenue for the government. There are things the government should not tax. Yet, returning once again to the well-thumbed June report on manufacturing incentives produced by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, that…
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Saving Atlantic Loggerheads from Plastics
On the evening of June 11, two endangered Loggerhead sea turtles crawled out of the ocean and wriggled up the sand at Virginia Beach. One dug a hole, laid 150-eggs and covered them with sand before returning to sea. The eggs had to be carefully relocated by human intervention to a safer nesting spot. In about…
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Bacon Bits: Hydroponics, Seawalls, and Emotional Support Critters
The future of Virginia agriculture? Shenandoah Growers, an indoor agriculture company, is undertaking a $100 million expansion of its three locations in Virginia over the next year. The facilities not only grow vegetables and spices in greenhouses, they package and ship the produce, reports the Daily News-Record. Locating the greenhouses next door to the packaging facilities…
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Bacon Bits: Two Reasons to Be Worried, and One Reason Not
Be afraid, very afraid. How frequent is cell phone use? According to a team of Old Dominion University researchers tallying seat belt use, some 4% of drivers they spot are on the phone or texting. So reports the Daily Press. Clearly, cell phone use is a problem. But I would argue that texting (which I…
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Moral Hazard and Sea Level Rise
Why aren’t Virginia localities acting more aggressively to protect themselves from rising sea levels? You don’t have to believe in catastrophic global warming to acknowledge that sea levels are creeping steadily higher worldwide or that subsidence caused by shifting tectonic plates and shrinking aquifers is aggravating flooding in Virginia’s Tidewater. A big reason for the…
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The Waters Increased Greatly upon the Earth
Over the past decade or so, as I traveled with my family to Sandbridge Beach, I watched in amazement, and a touch of disbelief, as large, upscale houses sprouted from the landscape that was once flat, treeless farmland. The development was Asheville Park. It was approved in 2004 for 499 homes on 474 acres. The…
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Rider E Case Shows Many Flaws With This Process
Dominion Energy Virginia’s pending application for a new charge on electric bills for coal ash remediation is both a fairly routine request and an illustration of what is deeply wrong with Virginia’s electricity regulation. When the major investor-owned utilities negotiated a return to regulation in 2007, the ability to create and collect these stand-alone add-on…
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VA Energy Regulatory Conference All About Carbon
WILLIAMSBURG — “The environmentalists don’t want to admit when they’ve won, but they’ve already won.” That line was delivered by Joseph A. Rosenthal, principal attorney at Connecticut’s Office of Consumer Counsel, during a discussion Thursday on the status electricity grid modernization efforts in his state and several others. It was a part of a day-and-a-half…
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Dominion Energy Joins Consortium Demanding Climate Change Legislation
I am not making this up. Yesterday, Dominion Energy joined a newly launched coalition of more than a dozen major corporations and environmental groups – CEO Climate Dialog. This organization will urge Congress to pass climate change legislation. Example members of the group include BP – an oil and gas company, Citibank, Dow Chemical, DuPont,…
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Dominion Announces Support for Carbon Tax
Dominion Energy has joined a coalition of 13 corporations and four leading environmental groups in support of a carbon tax and other measures designed to reduce CO2 emissions. The group, known as the CEO Climate Dialogue, has set a goal of achieving economy-wide reductions of 80% or more by 2050, with aggressive near- and mid-term…
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Anthropogenic Global Warming Is Real. Now What?
Four hundred and fifteen. US News & World Report is reporting that the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere reached more than 415 parts per million. The article quotes research from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography from May 11. Historical levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were measured through core ice samples prior to 1958…
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Dudes, Buy the Friggin’ Flood Insurance!
Sea levels may be rising and the risk of flooding increasing, but fewer Hampton Roads residents bought flood insurance in 2108 than five years previously, according to data presented by the Virginian-Pilot. Between 2013 and 2018 the number of households with flood insurance declined by about 5%. The only one of seven localities examined that…
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So Much for Millennials Saving the Planet
Are Millennials really different from older generations when it comes to transportation preferences? Is the younger generation, supposedly enlightened about the need to combat global warming, truly embracing bicycles and buses and the sharing economy over owning and driving their own automobiles? Here in Virginia, billions of dollars of mass transit and other infrastructure spending…
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Is the Goal Cutting CO2 or Imposing a Tax?
While it would have been a popular step with his political base, and one he was expected to take, Governor Ralph Northam may have been smart to pass on seeking to veto state budget language preventing Virginia membership in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
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Virginia: Pretty Good Grades for Clean Air
On the subject of the competitiveness of large versus small metros (see previous post), one metric for gauging the quality of life is air pollution. All other things being equal, people would prefer to live in places with clean air than places with dirty air. Ozone remains a problem in Arlington, Fairfax and Henrico Counties,…