Category: Infrastructure
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Dominion’s Clever Legerdemain
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in Business and Economy, Courts and law, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Health Care, Immigration, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka You may have read thousands of words on this blog arguing about the proposed federal Clean Power Plan, its impact on Dominion Virginia Power and a new law passed by the 2015 General Assembly that freezes the utility’s base rates and exempts it from rate reviews for five years. All of this…
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Time For a Fossil Fuel Reality Check
By Peter Galuszka Let’s pause for a moment, catch our breath and realize what is really going on in the world of fossil fuel and climate change. We’ve heard tons of loosely-based opinion from climate change deniers and drum beaters for the “War on Coal” crowd. Here are two recent news items: Coal baron Robert…
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A Preview of Virginia’s Looming Energy Crisis
by James A. Bacon Hampton Roads north of the James River could face brownouts or rolling blackouts within two years if Dominion Virginia Power can’t start building a transmission line across the river on a timely basis, the power company informed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers earlier this month. The Daily Press uncovered the…
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Film Rips Climate Change Deniers
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in Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Energy, Environment, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka A just-released documentary “Merchants of Doubt” seems tailor-made for the readers of Bacons Rebellion. The film by Robert Kenner explores the profession of doubting climate change in which the energy industry quietly hires “scientists” to debunk the idea that carbon dioxide emissions are creating global warming that could have catastrophic consequences. The…
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Why Clean Energy Will Be Cheaper
By Peter Galuszka The Sturm und Drang to which utility executives, coal companies and politicians have subjected Virginians as they oppose President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon emissions has always been a deliberate distraction from what’s really happening. According to them and their confederates at the State Corporation Commission and the state…
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Government Fragmentation and Economic Growth
by James A. Bacon What are the secrets of successful metropolitan regions? According to conventional economic-development thinking here in Virginia, success hinges upon the ability to maintain a positive business climate, a concept that encompasses everything from tax rates to the tort system, the transportation network to the education level of the workforce. But a…
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“Hacking for Good” Comes to Virginia
by James A. Bacon Michael Kolbe experienced first-hand the power of data-driven election campaigning while working on the 2012 Obama re-election team. He went on to take a job as a strategy analyst for Health Diagnostic Laboratory in Richmond but didn’t discard his idealism. Hoping to harness the power of data to solve social problems, he joined…
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Closely Watched Trains?
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in Business and Economy, Courts and law, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka The small town of Pembroke in southwest Virginia is used to seeing endlessly long unit trains of coal cars rumbling past. But last week, it got an unexpected surprise – trains of similar length hauling crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken fields started going by. According to Reuters, Pembroke is one of…
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Land, Density and Resilience
One more takeaway from the Resilient Virginia launch conference yesterday: All other things being equal, more compact communities are more resilient communities. Like Bacon’s Rebellion, Cooper Martin, program director of the Sustainable Cities Institute, is a big fan of Joe Minicozzi and his maps and graphics showing how dramatically land value-per-acre varies between core urban…
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Resilience and Competitive Economic Advantage
by James A. Bacon If you were a manufacturing company contemplating an expansion to Hampton Roads, you would take into account traditional criteria such as proximity to customers and suppliers, access to a skilled workforce, transportation connections, prevailing wage levels, taxes and so on. But as corporations become increasingly sensitive to the issue of business continuity in the…
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The Non Global-Warmist’s Case for Resiliency Planning
by James A. Bacon The key to building a strong resiliency movement — making communities more adaptable in the face of natural and man-made disasters — is finding common ground. So argued Steven McNulty, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Southeast Regional Climate Hub, in addressing the launch event of Resilient Virginia this morning. Fear of…
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Propping Up Coal at the Taxpayers’ Expense
By Peter Galuszka It’s always curious when big business and their bankrolled politicians complain about how the government and its regulations stymie the “magic of the free market.” Then they turn around and keep protectionist policies that give certain industries big favors such as tax credits. That’s what the General Assembly has done with a…
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The Self-Inflicted Infrastructure “Crisis”
by James A. Bacon We continually hear about an “infrastructure crisis” in the United States, a malady from which Virginia has not been spared. Talk of pot-holed streets, tottering bridges and crumbling highways invariably moves to talk about the need to spend more on infrastructure, which morphs into raising taxes — never by talk about paring back…
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U.S. 29… The Saga Continues
The battle over the Charlottesville Bypass may be over, but the battle over what to do instead is heating up. After pulling the plug on the super-controversial, $240 million bypass early last year, the McAuliffe administration dusted off a plan to upgrade the U.S. 29 commercial corridor north of Charlottesville by investing in a series…
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Let Richmond Be Richmond
I delivered this speech last night to a gathering at the Branch House in an event hosted by the Virginia Center for Architecture. — JAB Buffalo, N.Y., a metropolitan region about the size of Richmond, is debating how to pay for a new $1 billion stadium complex for the Buffalo Bills National Football League team.…