Category: Resilience
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Shellenberger’s “Apocalypse Never” Lessons for VA
“Climate change is real but it’s not the end of the world. It is not even our most serious environmental problem.” By Steve Haner That statement opens the dust jacket summary for “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All” by Michael Shellenberger, once named “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine. It remains the…
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A Reasonable Approach to Sea-Level Rise
by James A. Bacon Virginia’s environmentalists are smarter and more forward-thinking than California’s environmentalists. That’s a low bar, admittedly, but it’s a not-inconsiderable consolation now that environmental lobbyists and their friends in the Democratic Party run the commonwealth. In California, leaders of the environmental/political establishment fervently believe that human-caused climate change is increasing the incidence…
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A Look at Richmond and COVID-19
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in Agriculture & forestry, Business and Economy, Children and Families, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Consumer Protection, Culture wars, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Efficiency in Government, Entrepreneurs and Innovation, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Housing, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Money in politics, Planning, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Resilience, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Telecommunications, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka Here is a roundup story I wrote for Style Weekly that was published today that explains the effects of COVID-19 on the Richmond area. Hopefully, BR readers will find it of interest. It was a tough piece to report. The impacts of the deadly virus are very complicated and multi-faceted. An especially…
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Getting Serious about Flooding
by James A. Bacon Everybody talks about the weather, as the old saying goes, but nobody does anything about it. Well, here in Virginia, people are getting serious about one aspect of the weather — flooding. Last week Governor Ralph Northam issued an executive order, the Virginia Flood Risk Management Standard, to encourage the “smart…
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Reliability, Resilience and a 100% Renewable Electric Grid
by James A. Bacon California is getting a vivid lesson on the trade-offs between sustainability and reliability of the electric grid. Pacific Gas & Electric has taken the extraordinary action of cutting off electric power to 700,000 customers in California to reduce the risk of sparking forest fires. Many customers could go without power for…
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Should Virginia Beach Buy Out Flood-Prone Properties at Fair Market Value?
by James A. Bacon As Hurricane Dorian bears down on the South Atlantic Coast, the Virginian-Pilot reports that Virginia Beach officials are considering a program to buy out residents who want to move out of homes that have flooded or face a risk of flooding. The land would be converted into parks, planted with trees,…
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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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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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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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Floods, Roads and Risk Management
In a blog post yesterday (“Risk and the Fisc”), I cited an Old Dominion University study that guesstimated that Katrina-scale hurricane could cause $40 billion in damages and lost economic activity in Hampton Roads. The cost to the Commonwealth of coping with such a disaster, said Secretary of Finance Aubrey Layne, “keeps me up at…
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Does Virginia Beach Have the Right Investment Priorities?
The City of Virginia Beach has shelled out $265 million in public funds to support 13 major public-private development projects from the Cavalier Hotel renovation to the Sandler Center for the Performing Arts. Those projects have attracted more than $1 billion in private investment, said Virginia Beach Mayor Bobby Dyer in his state-of-the-city address two…
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Bacon Bits: Rails, Roads, Hurricanes and Rainbows
Still off the tracks. Despite promising efforts by top-level management, the Washington Metro corporate culture is still dysfunctional. An audit of $1.9 million in blanket purchase agreements found missing and incomplete documents, reports the Washington Times. “Auditors found that Metro employees failed to record $845,000 as BPAs in their accounting software, a problem the inspector general attributed…
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Shoreline Resiliency Funds for Hampton Roads?
In 2016 former Governor Terry McAuliffe signed a bill that set up a revolving loan fund to help homeowners and businesses elevate their properties to safeguard against sea level rise. Just one problem, says the Virginian-Pilot. The fund has no dedicated revenue source. Two years later, “the well is dry.” Now the Virginia Conservation Network…
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The Cyber Threat to Utilities Just Got Scarier
Russian hackers have broken into the control rooms of U.S. utilities where they could cause blackouts, federal officials have told the Wall Street Journal. The Russian hackers, who worked for a shadowy state-sponsored group previously identified as Dragonfly or Energetic Bear, broke into supposedly secure “air gapped” or isolated networks owned by utilities with relative…